Product: Pentium 4 1.5GHz
Company: Intel
Website: http://www.intel.com
Estimated Street Price: $848.00
Review By: Julien JAY

i82850 Chipset

    It’s nobody’s secret the previous camino i820 chipset had minor troubles only with SDRAM memory, and was excessively accentuated by Intel competitors and AMD fans. However the reliability of the i820 chipset is better than previously thought and compared to the numerous bugs that affect motherboards built around VIA chipsets (USB issues, software compatibility, hardware compatibility, etc.), the i820 is a rock of stability. Irritated by the i820 denigration campaign, Intel has doubled its efforts to make the i850 chipset a strong and robust one bringing all the features advanced users request: the i850 is basically an evolution of the i840E chipset. It’s composed of two chips the MCH (memory controller hub) i82850 and the ICH (I/O controller hub) i82801BA. This last component is also known as the ICH2 that comes with the i815 chipset. The brand new i850 chipset supports the following bus: a quad pumped 100 MHz bus designed only for Pentium 4, a double sided channel RDRAM bus, an 1.5v AGP 4x bus, and a Commuter Bus to the South Side J.

Intel i850 chipset

Intel continues on its start since they still use with the i850 chipset the RAMBUS memory standard and only that one. If Rambus memory barrettes are efficient they are simply too expensive. Intel’s partnership with Rambus Corporation put Rambus into a position to price their products at an incredibly high price making their really good product a luxury product (about $540 for 256 MB when the same amount of memory costs only 4 times less in SDRAM). However we’re confident that things will change and that Rambus will slash down its prices eventually. The i850 chipset manages Rambus memory marvellously by using a double-sided RDRAM channel in order to access two RDRAM barrettes at a time in order to hold simultaneously the bandwidth reaching the incredibly high rate of 2.98 GB/s.

Rambus memory barettes
  

Review Quotes
		"The i850 chipset manages Rambus memory marvellously, using a double-sided RDRAM channel"

The i850 doesn’t support DDR-SDRAM memory yet but it should be available in mid 2001. The ICH2 component integrates some interesting new features too! It delivers twice the I/O bandwidth over traditional bridge architectures and provides dedicated data paths to fully optimize the additional bandwidth. The ICH2 directly connects to graphics and memory for fast access to peripherals and provides a higher system level performance. It now supports UDMA 100 technology for high speed IDE hard disks using appropriate 80pins IDE cables.

Intel i850 chipset

    It also comes with two USB 1.1 controllers that feature a 24 MB/s bandwidth across the four ports resulting in a significant increase over previous USB controllers, which allows the use of high demanding USB devices like burners, video capture devices, etc. Depending on the motherboard you’ll choose the ICH2 chip may support full surround sound with up to six channels AC’ 97 audio and 10/100 network connections. The i850 chipset sets the record high bandwidth data transfer amount of 1 GB/s for the AGP 4x connector delivering astonishing 3D graphics (it also supports AGP fast write technology).