Alright, I think I have fallen behind on my chipsets a little, so i have a question. Which chipset would be the best for my current parts? (sig). At the moment I have an intel 845E I think... which i have gatherd arent the greatest. Any opinions or comments will be helpful im sure. ~Temporal~
On the Intel front you have the i865P/PE/GE (also Springdale) and the i875P (Canterwood). Canterwood is the high-end chipset and Springdale is the low-end chipset. However, several companies--Asus, Abit, and Epox--have implented the extra memory tweak known as PAT supposed to be exclusive to Canterwood. Another thing that's implemented is the ability to lock the PCI and AGP busses at 33/66MHz respectively. This greatly improves the overclocks people can hit. While they are dual- channel memory chipsets, you can run one stick in a Springdale board. Canterwood boards may fail to boot without both memory channels populated with something. SiS 655DX chipset is pretty good too. Asus P4 board on this chipset is pretty good from what I've read and it performs pretty close to the Canterwood chipset for a lot less. It is also the most lenient as far as memory sticks go. You can slap in a stick from Crucial and a stick from Corsair without a problem---for example. You can do that with Intel's stuff. ATi RS300 (IGP9100): So far only Gigabyte and Asus have a board based on this chipset, but it is pretty nice. The RS300 has an integrated GPU that's more or less doing similar performance to your Radeon 9000. Like Intel and SiS offerings it too is a dual-channel chipset. Via PT800 and PT880. The latest P4 chipsets from Via. The PT800 is single channel and the PT880 is a dual-channel memory chipset. The PT880 is pretty close in performance to the Canterwood chipset. I'm running an Abit IS7-E with my 2.4B and have it running at over 3.1GHz. Definitely recommended. I would pickup a second stick as you'll have no better performance with a single stick. You're only advantage would be the locked PCI/AGP busses and you may just be maxing out your CPU overclock---although that's not for sure.
