Intel 845 Chipset Review & Motherboard Roundup: September 2001

Already a Mature Platform

Since we've already provided chipset performance data in our P4X266 review, we decided to turn this article into an introduction of both the chipset and a roundup of motherboards based on the 845. 

Intel 845 motherboards have been up and running for months now, which is one of the reasons why you've seen benchmarks for the platform so early. 

With the exception of one motherboard, every 845 motherboard we received worked flawlessly. 

One of the biggest problems we've encountered with motherboard reviews in the past has been stability/reliability testing.  Anyone familiar with the motherboard industry and how motherboards are made knows very well that you cannot accurately gauge stability of a motherboard through the use of any sort of software testing on a single motherboard.  True stability testing requires a very large sample size of motherboards and much more intensive procedures, which make rating stability/reliability very difficult to perform in a review.  The most we can offer is an indication of how the motherboard performed in our tests, which we have tried our best to do.

In order to put a greater stress on the motherboards themselves during the testing procedure, we modified our usual test bed a bit.  Instead of testing with 128MB or 256MB of PC133 SDRAM we used a full 384MB and set the memory timings using the modules' serial presence detect (SPD) logic.  The reason for using 384MB is so we could fill up all of the memory banks on the i845 motherboards (all of the boards had three memory slots) with a reasonable amount of memory that you could expect to see in this type of a system.  We used the very popular Crucial PC133 SDRAM modules (all three were identical) that featured CAS2 Micron -7E PC133 SDRAM chips. 

There is no shame in on-board Sound

When AC'97 codecs first started appearing on motherboards, they were very poor in quality and CPUs weren't necessarily powerful enough to handle all of the mixing and other effects that would normally be offloaded to the DSP on a hardware sound card.  What many don't understand is that the AC'97 codec on a motherboard is no different than the AC'97 codec on a sound card like the Sound Blaster Live!; it's the DSP that is the real difference between "hardware" and "software" sound.  For basic sound and even just playing MP3s, the on-board AC'97 codecs on many of today's motherboards is more than enough.

The i845 motherboards present in this roundup had very solid AC'97 codecs, the best being the SoundMAX codec found on the Intel boards.