Two weeks ago Intel launched the first 533MHz FSB CPUs at 2.4 and 2.53GHz; alongside the new CPUs Intel introduced the first 533MHz FSB chipset - the 850E. Today Intel is transitioning all of their Pentium 4 chipsets to 533MHz FSB platforms with the release of the 845E. Just as was the case with the 850E, the only change that is made to the 845E is the official support for the 533MHz FSB.

At the same time, Intel is finally ready to debut their first new 3D graphics core in four years. Unlike Intel's first shot at the graphics market (the i740), you won't find this new core on add-in graphics cards; the new graphics core will only be found in two new Pentium 4 chipsets Intel is announcing today as well - the i845G and 845GL.

Why all the fuss over a chipset with integrated graphics? Some of the largest markets in the computer industry are for systems with cheap integrated graphics. The low-end consumer and corporate sectors are almost exclusively integrated graphics markets because of their sensitivity to price and lack of need for higher performance solutions. Since those are some of the highest volume areas it's not too surprising that Intel has pushed for development of an updated 3D core in order to tailor to those markets.

However the launch of these new chipsets is a bit unlike the launch of most Intel chipsets in that motherboards aren't largely available. When the 845 chipset was first launched a total of 11 motherboards were ready and in our hands well before the chipset was officially announced. For our 845 DDR roundup, published on Intel's announcement date, we had 12 boards at our disposal. This time around however the situation is significantly different. Most motherboard manufacturers weren't ready with their samples and we were only able to get boards from DFI, Gigabyte, and MSI as well as Intel of course.

We're not sure if this indicates a relative lack of enthusiasm for the chipset among Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers or if other issues were present. Even in spite of the lackluster launch there are still more boards available based on the new chipsets than any SiS or VIA launch which is something we've been pushing both of those manufacturers to improve to little avail.

Finally, USB 2.0 support

It has been almost two years since Intel has released a new I/O Controller Hub (ICH, aka South Bridge) for their desktop chipsets. When the 815E was launched Intel introduced their ICH2 which offered Ultra ATA/100 support and four integrated USB 1.1 ports. Since then, every desktop chipset from Intel has used ICH2 including all of the Pentium 4 chipsets (850, 850E and 845). With the 845E/G/GL Intel is introducing their first ICH with integrated USB 2.0 support - ICH4 (ICH3 was only used for server chipsets, e.g. E7500).

ICH Size Comparison
ICH4 (left) vs ICH2 (right) - Pictures are to scale

The USB 2.0 controller integrated in ICH4 can support a total of six USB 2.0/1.1 ports; it's up to the motherboard manufacturers to take advantage of the support. The integrated controller increases the die size of the ICH considerably making it more expensive to implement and thus keeping it from immediately making its way into all Intel chipsets. The ICH is long overdue for a die shrink and when that happens you can expect it to make its way into more chipsets and costs to come down as well.

845G Graphics

As we mentioned at the start of this review Intel has finally introduced a completely new graphics core for use with the 845G and 845GL chipsets. Intel's first try at 3D graphics came with the i740 in 1997 and it received an update in 1999 with the i752. With the 845G Intel has designed a completely new core with a few interesting features.

For starters, although Intel likes calling their new graphics engine a DirectX 8.x solution the 845G 3D core features no programmable pipelines. On top of that, the core features no hardware T&L support either. The name of the game here is reducing die size to the point where the cost of including this new graphics core is minimal.

MCH Size Comparison
845G GMCH (left) vs 845E MCH(right) - Pictures are to scale

The low-cost nature of the graphics core is reiterated in the fact that it only has a single rendering pipeline running at 200MHz. It's important to note that even the NVIDIA MX line features two rendering pipelines but as you can probably guess for every pixel rendering pipeline you have to duplicate the number of texture coordinate generators and texture processing units. Having only a single rendering pipeline is actually something that Intel did even with the original i740 which ends up killing fill rate.

Luckily Intel has outfitted this single pipeline with the ability of processing four textures in a single pass. The ability to process many textures in a single pass is generally included to reduce memory bandwidth consumption (the more passes that are necessary, the more bandwidth is consumed) which outlines the second design goal Intel went for with the 845G core - efficient use of memory bandwidth.

Since this new graphics core would be used in SMA (shared memory architecture) setups conserving memory bandwidth is very important as every last bit of memory bandwidth that's taken up by the graphics is removed from the disposal of the CPU and the rest of the system.

There are three memory related features that the 845G core is outfitted with. The first is what Intel calls Dynamic Video Memory Technology, which is a fancy way of talking about how the graphics core allocates memory for its own use. Since the core has no dedicated "local" video memory, it must block off a section of system memory for its own use. The conventional way of doing this is to set a certain size in the BIOS (e.g. 8 - 64MB) and that part of your system memory is blocked off only for use by the graphics core. As you can probably guess, that's a very wasteful approach since most of the time (in 2D situations at least) you aren't using anywhere close to that full amount. Intel's approach makes a lot of sense; the graphics controller (GMCH - Graphics and Memory Controller Hub) sends a request to the driver to allocate non-swappable, non-cacheable memory pages for graphics. Since the GMCH doesn't use AGP GART, rather its own translation tables for the memory addressing the pages don't have to be physically contiguous in the memory space. The GMCH won't block off a set size of memory, instead it will allocate a minimum amount of memory (0.5MB) and whenever an application demands more it will dynamically resize the allocated memory to compensate. This is designed to maximize system performance while using the integrated graphics controller by freeing up as much system memory as possible. For OEMs that want to advertise that their systems have 32MB or 64MB of graphics memory, they can select a minimum amount of memory to set aside for the GMCH. Doing this doesn't help performance any and actually it hurts performance since it makes the GMCH act a lot like a conventional SMA graphics controller, allocating more memory than it actually needs for the sake of being able to advertise large memory sizes.

When it comes to memory bandwidth efficiency the remaining two technologies come into play. Intel's Intelligent Memory Manager Technology defines a new way of addressing memory for the GMCH; there's not much information on how the technology actually works but it splits the allocated memory up into squares or tiles and manages to decouple the front and back of the rendering engine in order to optimize the graphics data to be provided in a very DRAM-friendly manner. This is another measure Intel took in order to make sure that the use of a SMA graphics core would not adversely impact overall system performance (at least noticeably).

Intel's Zone Rendering Technology

Finally there is Intel's Zone Rendering Technology; this technology actually effects the manner in which 3D scenes are rendered and optimizes the rendering process for the GMCH's internal caches/buffers in order to improve memory bandwidth efficiency. At the end of the single rendering pipeline there is a fairly large cache for colors/Z-values. As data comes through the pipeline the zone rendering engine sorts the workload (triangles) in order to fit within the cache. During the actual rendering, the scene is rendered one zone at a time but since a lot of the color/Z data is now located within the chip's cache a lot of bandwidth can be saved (e.g. reads/writes to the Z-buffer).

In terms of features that are supported by the new graphics core, things like non-power of 2 texture sizes are important as they will be necessary for Microsoft's next-generation OS (Longhorn) that is supposed to make considerable use of 3D in its UI. Texture compression is supported in the form of DXTn and FXT1 which is another first for an Intel graphics core (although the rest of the graphics world has had it for years now). There is also a lot of logic included in the design that aids in switching between 2D and 3D modes which isn't very important for most uses of the graphics core but could come in handy with future OSes.

When combined with the 845G chipset there is still an external AGP 4X slot that you can populate with an add-in card for higher 3D performance. The 845GL however does not feature an external AGP slot which is the only difference between the two chipsets.

In terms of performance, the 845G graphics is comparable to a GeForce2 MX 200 which isn't a very high level of performance at all. Intel expects to stick to their current graphics release schedule in that they will be releasing an updated graphics core every two years. With a big push towards raising the bar in terms of 3D performance before Longhorn ships, we'd think that Intel would have to do a bit more than what they've done with the 845G's graphics in order to truly raise the performance bar. At least when the i740 came out it was a competitive part, but unless Intel invests some serious time and effort into the graphics market then it will be difficult for them to stand up in such a competitive arena.

DDR333 - Only for the 845G

Although Intel still hasn't officially embraced DDR333 as a memory standard, motherboards based on the 845G chipset do support the proper multiplier in order to run the memory bus asynchronously at 166MHz for use with DDR333 memory. Obviously Intel's own 845G board won't allow it but the third party solutions out of Taiwan seem to have no problem with enabling DDR333 support. This gives the 845G the ability to compete with VIA's P4X333 on a performance level.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said about the 845E which only adds support for the 533MHz FSB without offering the proper multiplier for DDR333 memory.

We've included this table to help compare the latest Pentium 4 chipsets:

The Test

Just like our P4X333 Review, we've reduced the number of benchmarks run to those that provide the best display of pure chipset/platform performance. Thus benchmarks such as MP3 encoding and the vast majority of 3D rendering tests that don't vary significantly have been omitted from our usual test suite.

Internet Content Creation & General Usage Performance

With this review we continue to use SYSMark 2002; SYSMark 2002 can be considered to be a much more memory bandwidth intensive version of the Winstone tests. The benchmark is split into two parts, Internet Content Creation which deals with content creation applications (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc...) and Office Productivity which is more general usage oriented (Word, Excel, Netscape, Anti-Virus, etc...).

The 2002 update changes things around a bit; first of all the benchmark's total scores are arrived at differently than in the 2001 benchmark. Windows Media Encoder no longer accounts for close to half of the Internet Content Creation test, rather only about 10%. There is also no need for a special Athlon XP SSE patch as the 2002 suite uses a version of the encoding dll that properly detects SSE support on all Palomino cores as well as Pentium 4 cores.

The rest of the benchmark is much more evenly distributed and it is much more memory bandwidth intensive than the old benchmark. The Internet Content Creation tests on average use about 600MB/s of bandwidth vs 300MB in SYSMark 2001. The Office Productivity tests are still stuck at around 580MB/s of memory bandwidth.

For more information on the tests and the applications used consult this whitepaper provided by BAPCo.

Internet Content Creation Performance Internet Content Creation SYSMark 2002 VIA P4X333 (533/DDR333) Intel 850E (533/PC1066) Intel 850E (533/PC800) VIA P4X333 (533/DDR266) Intel 845G (533/DDR333) Intel 845G (533/DDR266) Intel 845E (533/DDR266) SiS 645 (533/DDR333) SiS 645 (533/DDR266) 333 331 331 325 314 306 300 298 291 | 0 | 67 | 133 | 200 | 266 | 333 | 400

Initially we have the 845G hot on the heels of the P4X333, in this case coming within 3% of the recently announced VIA chipset.

General Usage Performance Office Productivity SYSMark 2002 Intel 850E (533/PC1066) Intel 850E (533/PC800) VIA P4X333 (533/DDR333) Intel 845G (533/DDR333) VIA P4X333 (533/DDR266) Intel 845G (533/DDR266) SiS 645 (533/DDR333) Intel 845E (533/DDR266) SiS 645 (533/DDR266) 181 179 173 171 166 163 154 149 147 | 0 | 36 | 72 | 109 | 145 | 181 | 217

Here the performance gap between the two chipsets is reduced even further; less than 2% separates the P4X333 from the 845G.

3D Rendering Performance using SSE2

While 3D Studio MAX is SSE2 optimized, the level of optimization is nowhere near what NewTek reported with Lightwave upon releasing version 7.0b. The performance improvements offered by the new SSE2 optimized version were all above 20% using NewTek's supplied benchmarking scenes.

As we've shown countless times in the past, most 3D rendering applications require a good deal of memory bandwidth but not enough to illustrate differences between these platforms. Because of this we've stuck to only a single benchmark for the 3D rendering portion of our tests.

3D Rendering Performance using SSE2 Lightwave 7.5 (Raytrace Benchmark) (Image Render Time in Seconds) Intel 850E (533/PC1066) Intel 845G (533/DDR333) Intel 845G (533/DDR266) VIA P4X333 (533/DDR333) VIA P4X333 (533/DDR266) Intel 850E (533/PC800) Intel 845E (533/DDR266) SiS 645 (533/DDR333) SiS 645 (533/DDR266) 121.4 121.8 121.8 121.9 122.4 122.6 123.2 123.4 125.2 | 0 | 25 | 50 | 75 | 100 | 125 | 150

While the 845G and P4X333 swap positions once again the performance difference between the two is intangible.

3D Gaming Performance

When it comes to most 3D games there's generally very little performance to be found by heavily optimizing for SSE2 or 3DNow! on either of these processors and thus the performance is mostly dependent on the overall platform (e.g. FPU capabilities, chipset, memory latency/bandwidth, cache latency/bandwidth, etc...). This makes gaming benchmarks the most important when doing a chipset comparison since it's much easier to see performance differences between chipsets.

We'll start off with our favorite 3D gaming benchmark - the Unreal Performance Test 2002. For an explanation of what this test is and why it is so significant, be sure to read our 15-way GPU Shootout that we used to introduce the test. In short, the benchmark uses the current build of the Unreal Engine (that will power games such as UnrealTournament 2003 and Unreal II) and serves as a great indication for future performance in games that use the engine.

Next-Generation 3D Gaming Performance Unreal Performance Test 2002 Build 918 - 1024 x 768 x 32 Intel 850E (533/PC1066) VIA P4X333 (533/DDR333) Intel 845G (533/DDR333) Intel 850E (533/PC800) VIA P4X333 (533/DDR266) SiS 645 (533/DDR333) Intel 845G (533/DDR266) Intel 845E (533/DDR266) SiS 645 (533/DDR266) 50.5 49.6 49.0 48.4 48.1 47.8 47.5 46.6 45.5 | 0 | 10 | 20 | 30 | 40 | 51 | 61

Although VIA has had much more experience in producing DDR memory controllers than Intel, the 845G's GMCH is able to offer performance equal to VIA's finest DDR333 memory controller. This is one of those situations where sheer R&D budget can outshine production line experience.

3D Gaming Performance Quake III Arena - High Quality - 1024x768x32 Intel 850E (533/PC1066) VIA P4X333 (533/DDR333) Intel 850E (533/PC800) Intel 845G (533/DDR333) SiS 645 (533/DDR333) VIA P4X333 (533/DDR266) Intel 845G (533/DDR266) SiS 645 (533/DDR266) Intel 845E (533/DDR266) 299.6 292.5 283.3 281.3 280.6 279.1 268.7 259.1 246.0 | 0 | 60 | 120 | 180 | 240 | 300 | 36

Under Quake III Arena we're able to see the largest lead the P4X333 ever holds over the 845G. At 4%, the performance advantage isn't enough to be even remotely noticeable to end users.

Our final two benchmarks paint a similar picture to what we've seen throughout this entire review - the 845G and P4X333 are effectively performance equals.

3D Gaming Performance Jedi Knight 2 - High Quality - 1024x768x32 Intel 850E (533/PC1066) VIA P4X333 (533/DDR333) Intel 850E (533/PC800) Intel 845G (533/DDR333) SiS 645 (533/DDR333) VIA P4X333 (533/DDR266) Intel 845G (533/DDR266) Intel 845E (533/DDR266) SiS 645 (533/DDR266) 122.5 117.5 113.4 113.1 112.1 111.8 109.4 104.3 103.9 | 0 | 25 | 49 | 74 | 98 | 123 | 147

3D Gaming Performance Comanche 4 - High Quality - 1024x768x32 Intel 850E (533/PC1066) Intel 850E (533/PC800) Intel 845G (533/DDR333) VIA P4X333 (533/DDR333) Intel 845G (533/DDR266) SiS 645 (533/DDR333) Intel 845E (533/DDR266) VIA P4X333 (533/DDR266) SiS 645 (533/DDR266) 52.0 49.8 48.3 48.2 47.4 46.9 46.6 46.5 45.2 | 0 | 10 | 21 | 31 | 42 | 52 | 62

- The 850E with PC1066 RDRAM is still the highest performing solution for the Pentium 4; however the performance advantage isn't too incredibly significant (generally under 10%). This keeps the 850E from being the most economical solution for the Pentium 4 but it is the best performing.

- The 845E and the SiS 645 are the two poorest performing chipsets on average although they are much more available than the two new DDR solutions (845G/P4X333). It's simply a case of out with the old and in with the new.

- The 845G and P4X333 are the highest performing DDR chipsets for the Pentium 4. The two solutions perform very close to one another however the 845G wins out because of the fact that you'll find it in more motherboards than the P4X333, unless VIA can surprise us with a tier 1 motherboard manufacturer. Since the P4X333 does not have any integrated graphics the price of P4X333 boards should be noticeably lower than 845G boards but given that the 845G GMCH is manufactured on a 0.18-micron process the integrated graphics shouldn't add too much to the price of the chipset.