Date: June 3, 2008 - Author: Rory Buszka
Intel's next-generation chipset offerings in the mid-range and enterprise-level markets have arrived in the form of three mid-range offerings in Intel's 4-Series of chipsets, including two with integrated graphics. In this article, we'll lay out the differences, and help you understand your new options.
While enthusiast chipsets like X38 and X48 set the performance bar high for Intel platforms, the real bread and butter of chipset makers like Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD, and often the more common choice of enthusiasts, is the mid-range product category. And it’s easy to see why – it’s usually possible to build a stable, powerful enthusiast system on the back of a mid-range chipset, and Intel’s P35 became a mainstay of gamers and price-conscious enthusiasts during its tenure for that reason.
Now, Intel is officially rolling out the successors to G33, G35, and P35, with the introduction of their 4-series counterparts, the G43, G45, and P45 chipsets. G43 and G45 feature an updated X4500 graphics core on-die, which provides DirectX 10 support for the first time in an Intel product, though NVIDIA and AMD have been there for some time now, while the P45 is essentially the G45, without the graphics processor.
All three chipsets use the Intel ICH10 or ICH10R chipset, with the “R” variant offering support for a technology called “Turbo Memory”, which we’ll cover in detail later. There appears to be no difference between the ICH10 and the ICH9, except that the manufacturing process has shrunk to 65nm, reducing power dissipation. The northbridges themselves have also been transitioned to a 65nm process, for power savings and heat reduction.
We took a look at a P45 motherboard last week with our review of the ASUS P5Q Deluxe, and found that more than simply updating a few performance specs, as chipset makers are known for often doing, the Intel P45 had a nice surprise in store for us regarding its power consumption, shaving 33W off the measured power consumption of the test system when compared to the P35. Now, let’s dive into a summary of the other differences the three chipsets have to offer.
We’ll start with the top of the range, the Intel P45 Express. Intel’s chipset names have carried the “Express” moniker ever since support for PCI Express was added, but now that it’s the de-facto baseline standard for a motherboard to offer some form of PCI Express capability, the added meaning is a little empty. What isn’t empty, however, is the new chipset’s PCI Express 2.0 capability, which may be configured in a single 16-lane interface, or two 8-lane interfaces, for tandem graphics processing. AMD’s current mid-range performance chipset, the AMD 770, lacks Crossfire capabilities, though NVIDIA offers their nForce 750i MCP, which offers parallel-GPU processing in a more affordable package for the upper end of the mid-range category.
Let’s take a look at CPU support next. The P45 Express supports a front-side bus speed of 1333MHz, which means that FSB1600 CPUs like the QX9770 will be hampered. However, CPUs with a 1600MHz front-side bus make up a small segment of Intel’s current product line at the high-end, so you’ll likely want to pair these high-performance CPUs with an X48 motherboard anyhow. With the exception of the QX9770 and the Skulltrail QX9775 CPUs, however, P45 will work just fine with any current Intel CPU, including newer 45nm parts.
(As a brief erratum, the ASUS P5Q Deluxe report was incorrect in stating that the P45 supported FSB1600 – the P45 tops out at FSB1333. That article will be corrected.)
With regard to memory, the P45 Express natively supports dual-channel DDR2 800 memory on the DDR2 side (though more testing will reveal its true upper limit in practice, as the performance envelope is pushed), while supporting up to DDR3 1066 on the DDR3 side of things, though DDR3 operation cuts the chipset’s supported memory size in half from 16GB to 8GB. The stated maximum bandwidth under DDR2 is 12.8GB/s when in dual-channel interleave mode, and under DDR3, the stated bandwidth is 17 GB/s, numbers that the chipset pulls from dual 6.4GB/s and 8.5GB/s speeds on a per-channel basis. The P45 also supports “Flex Memory Technology”, which allows different-sized modules to be installed under dual-channel mode.
The P45 also supports a feature called Turbo Memory, which allows the chipset to use an additional NAND cache (similar to Windows Vista’s ReadyBoost feature -- its use also requires Windows Vista) to host frequently-accessed data that can help speed up boot times and program access, as well as providing an intermediate cache between the hard drive and the operating system (again, exactly like ReadyBoost). Where Turbo Memory differs from ReadyBoost is that the NAND memory modules would in this case be installed directly onto the motherboard itself and housed inside the PC, instead of the half-baked solution of using an external NAND flash drive connected to a USB 2.0 port. The P45’s Turbo Memory implementation also offers a capability called “User Pinning”, in which the user may decide what data is stored in the Turbo Memory modules, if present. We suspect a complementary ‘auto mode’ may be the default option, however. Turbo Memory first showed up in Centrino Pro based notebook PCs.
On the storage side, Intel P45 supports a new feature called “Matrix Storage” technology, which allows external drives to be connected via eSATA ports and be included in a RAID array. The P45 also supports “Rapid Recover” technology, which allows users to create a “clone” of their system drive, and reload data from the “clone” if the main hard drive should fail or become corrupted. Lastly, the P45 supports disabling of individual external USB or SATA ports, to prevent malicious data from being introduced via an external hard drive or flash drive, and “Quiet System Technology”, which uses more advanced fan speed control algorithms.
The reason we covered the P45 first of the three was because much of its functionality is shared with the G45 and G43 integrated-graphics chipsets. Next, let’s look ahead to the P45’s integrated-graphics cousins, and see what variations are present there.
We’re taking a look at three new motherboard chipsets from Intel, as part of their “4-Series” lineup of chipset products. The P45 Express chipset provides affordable performance in the mid-range category, and is a good choice for the majority of enthusiast systems.
However, perhaps more important in the consumer market are the integrated-graphics products, since these are the chipsets that find their way into the majority of consumer PCs, which shave dollars off the total hardware cost by avoiding discrete graphics altogether. Intel is bringing two new integrated-graphics contenders to the table, the G45 Express and G43 Express integrated-graphics chipsets.
The big news with the G45 and G43 graphics processors is their use of an integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X4500 core, which supports both Microsoft’s DirectX 10 and the forthcoming OpenGL 2.0 standard, though OpenGL 2.0 support will be added later by a software update. Shader Model 4.0 support is also present. The G43 and G45 Express chipsets otherwise duplicate the full functionality of the P45 Express chipset, with the only difference being the fact that the G43 and G45 integrate different levels of video processing hardware.
Intel’s G45 Express chipset is the higher-end offering of the two new integrated graphics chipsets being released, its feature set targeted toward media center PC and home theater PC applications. The GMA X4500 graphics core receives an “HD” designation here, because most of the difference in functionality between the G43 and G45 chipsets relates to hardware acceleration of video playback and post-processing functions.
The Intel GMA X4500HD video processor incorporates a trio of features that will be of importance to home theater and media center PC builders, one of them an absolute necessity if you’re planning on playing back any Blu-Ray discs anytime soon: HDCP compliance. High-Definition Content Protection, known around here as simply ‘HDCP’, is a content protection scheme used by modern hi-def formats like the late HD-DVD and the victorious Blu-Ray format. HDCP requires digital handshaking at every stage in the signal chain, starting at the player itself. That means that your PC’s graphics adapter will need to be HDCP-compliant in order to play back hi-def media at its full resolution, instead of a scaled-down standard-definition resolution. HDCP compliance is pretty much a given at this point on any hardware that features an HDMI connector, and the GMA X4500HD also supports the integration of an HDMI video output.
The GMA X4500HD video processor also brings Intel’s integrated-graphics offerings up to speed with the competition when it comes to hardware acceleration of HD video playback. AMD has had their AVIVO HD with UVD for some time now, and NVIDIA has had PureVideo HD. The GMA X4500HD offers similar hardware HD processing, accelerating H.264 playback at 1080p resolution. In addition, Intel has brought their Clear Video Technology to bear on the GMA X4500HD to provide post-processing functionality that improves color saturation and accuracy, and eliminates artifacts in playback. This places the X4500HD on more even footing with AMD’s 780G and 790GX IGP chipsets and Intel’s new GeForce 8300 “Motherboard GPU” when it comes to suitability for home theater PC use.
While Intel’s G45 Express chipset represents a higher-end integrated-graphics product, with its HD video processing and enhancement features, the G43 Express is an enterprise-class part (a kind way of saying ‘low-end’) that omits the HD video processing entirely. It’s still got a DX10-capable Intel GMA X4500 integrated graphics core, however, which is important for another reason – Intel’s low-end integrated-graphics chipsets have typically represented the low-end baseline for the entire integrated-graphics product category.
The GMA X4500 lacks the “HD” designation of the core that’s packed into the Intel G45 Express northbridge, but it still offers Intel Clear Video technology, for post-processing of video playback to reduce jitter, smooth edges, and improve brightness and color saturation. It also supports multiple digital outputs, though you won’t see an HDMI connector hanging off a G43 Express motherboard at any point in the near future.
The release of Intel’s new 4-Series chipsets is an important step forward for the company, and for the state of motherboard chipsets in general. They’ve managed to close the gap somewhat with AMD in the power consumption realm, with measurable power savings (as Rob discovered in the review of the ASUS P5Q Deluxe). The P45 is, by and large, an evolutionary part – there aren’t major earth-shattering changes, except for the shrink in manufacturing process. PCI Express 2.0 support will enable similar performance to current PCI Express embodiments, but with fewer lanes total, so the fact that the P45 only has 16 PCI-E 2.0 lanes to divide up isn’t a major tragedy with current graphics cards.
Much more notable with the move to the 4-Series is the introduction of the GMA X4500 graphics core, even with the enterprise-class X43. The very fact that Intel has chosen to anchor their 4-Series product lineup with a DirectX 10 part does two things – it pushes AMD’s value-line 690G chipset into virtual irrelevance as a DX9 part with Shader Model support that’s limited to Version 2.0, and it states definitively that the bottom end of the integrated-graphics totem pole will be a DirectX 10 part, effectively sounding the death knell for DirectX 9 parts.
Intel’s 4-Series chipset release is more exciting than it has any right to be, given the mere fact that it’s a chipset release, and not something sexier like a range of CPUs or GPUs. However, the excitement is mainly clustered around the G45 graphics processor, which combines all the functionality of P45 with the Intel GMA X4500HD graphics processor, for a part that’ll be in high demand among builders of media center and home theater PCs, and go toe-to-toe with high-end integrated-graphics offerings from manufacturers whose names are more synonymous with graphics performance. Time and further testing will tell whether the G45 has what it takes to grab a significant chunk of the media center PC market.
If you have a comment you wish to make on this article, feel free to head on into our forums! There is no need to register in order to reply to such threads.
Copyright © 2005-2008 Techgage Networks Inc. - All Rights Reserved.