By Tikkler - October 7, 2000

Infobox

Product Reviewed: CUSL2 Product Page Manufacturer: ASUSTeK Home Page Suggested Retail Price: Unspecified - About $150 USD

Back in 1997, Intel released a brand new chipset for their new 350MHz+ Pentium II/III processors called the 440BX. This chipset was a true marvel that proved to be the most reliable, highest performing chipset ever made for Intel processors at that time. With support for a 100MHz front side bus (FSB) and PC100 SDRAM, the BX put any competition from the likes of ALi and VIA to shame.

Two years later, Intel introduced two new chipsets for their Pentium III line of processors, the i810 and i820. The i810, coupled with their low-cost Celeron processors, was supposed to give Intel even more foot room in the low-end computer system market, while the i820, coupled with the over-rated RDRAM memory interface developed by RAMBUS, was supposed to give Intel more market share in the high-end arena and shoo off stiff competition coming from AMD and their Athlon processor. Unfortunately, these two new chipsets proved to be either too ahead or behind their times.

The i810 chipset was a low-end solution; therefore, Intel neglected to include any high-end features. These features include faster PC133 SDRAM support and the most important feature: an AGP slot. Since the i810 had integrated video in the form of a 2-year-old Intel graphics controller, Intel decided to not include any support for an AGP bus or slot. This meant that those who had jumped on-board the i810 bandwagon was limited to low-end graphics performance as most video card manufacturers don't make PCI versions of their cards (3dfx, however, does make a PCI version of their Voodoo5, which, in fact, performs almost identical to the AGP version). Coupled with the slow PC100 SDRAM limitation that prevented users from plugging a new Pentium III Coppermine processor that uses the 133MHz FSB, the i810 turned out to be a weak seller, especially in the minds of power users and gamers.

Unfortunately for Intel, their high-end solution, the i820, proved also to be a weak seller. The chipset had all the high-end features such as support for a 133MHz FSB and a 4X AGP slot for high-performance graphics cards such as NVIDIA's Geforce2 GTS, but the memory interface that Intel had chosen is where the i820 failed to deliver. Intel had decided to strike a deal with a company (RAMBUS) that designed this new type of memory called RDRAM and was supposed to perform considerably better than its SDRAM competition. They had designed the entire i820 chipset around RDRAM, expecting performance to be significantly boosted over the competition. RDRAM, however, turned out to perform almost identical to its SDRAM competition, even slower at some tasks, but there was one problem that was, and still is, preventing RDRAM from being used as a norm: its price. At the first release of the i820 chipset, RDRAM was about 6-8X the price of regular SDRAM-you do the math.

Not only wasn't their new chipsets selling strongly for Intel, they had some pretty stiff competition from VIA and their Apollo Pro 133A chipset. This chipset had support for the 133MHz FSB, AGP 4X and, most of all, the PC133 SDRAM support that Intel had neglected to include with any of their new chipsets. This chipset proved to perform very well, and could compete quite nicely with all of the Intel chipsets, including its 440BX. With Intel having problems selling their new chipsets and the fact that their Apollo Pro 133A chipset is an excellent-performing, feature-filled product, VIA gained a considerable portion of the market.

From the looks of things, Intel seemed desperate in terms of the chipset arena...

On to: Introducing the i815 Chipset