Things change. They always do. Never is this statement more true than when describing the computer hardware industry. Year in and year out, consumers are faced with new buzzwords, new technology and new promises on how these things will change their lives. After awhile, it starts to seem like ‘The boy who cried wolf’ as all the tech-speak starts to sound the same and you get immune to listening to all the praises about every ‘next big thing.’ On June 21, 2004, Intel will announce the launch of not just a new processor, but a new family of platforms. With it comes features and capabilities that will be the building blocks for the systems that you’ll play your PC games on tomorrow. The biggest question is, how will Intel make a solid case to you of why you should make the big plunge. Lets just take a look at what Intel has been holding back from us for so long to see what it will do for gamers.

Intel is introducing the i925 (formerly codenamed Alderwood) chipset and the i915 (formerly codenamed Grantsdale) chipset. The i925 is meant for workstations and power users. The i915 is more geared towards your average home users and business desktops. In addition to sporting the new LGA 775 pin for the new processors, the motherboards have an assortment of other features. They are Intel’s first PCI Express chipsets and support DDR2 to provide more responsive memory performance. The PCI Express bus architecture is a new, higher bandwidth bus technology for both graphics cards and add in cards. Intel High Definition Audio supports several audio formats for an outstanding home theater experience and is the most powerful integrated audio chip we’ve seen. The chipsets have the optional Intel RAID technology which features Intel Matrix Storage Technology that has features such as running RAID0 and RAID1 arrays simultaneously across two hard disks. The chipsets also support Intel Wireless Connect Technology which Intel boasts will enable consumers to set up and configure a wireless home network in four steps. It might sound like hoopla to you now, but we’ll explain the significance of each here.

Meanwhile, Intel is also introducing new processors to take advantage of these motherboards. First up are the 775 pin Prescotts which sport the new processor numbering scheme. These will simply be known as ‘Intel Pentium 4 Processor supporting Hyper –Threading Technology’ with the following numbers denoting the speeds: 560 (3.6 Ghz), 550 (3.4 Ghz), 540 (3.2 Ghz), 530 (3.0 Ghz), and 520 (2.8 Ghz). All of these chips are built off the new 90 nanometer fabrication process, sport an 800 Mhz Front Side Bus, 1 MB L2 Cache and of course support Hyper-Threading. They also support SSE3, previously known as the Prescott Instructions. These will form the core of Intel’s latest processor family.

At the same time, Intel has also brought over their current King of the Hill into the land of 775 pins. This is none other than the Pentium 4 3.4 Ghz Extreme Edition. Like the 478 pin versions before them, these chips sport a 2 MB L3 Cache. These are not based on the Prescott cores however, so they do not support SSE3. Still, the performance boost gained from the L3 Cache keep these processors at the top of the performance crown for Intel.

What we’re here to do is give you a briefing and introduction to this technology today, give you some brief benchmark results and go over how this introduction will change PC gaming. Throughout the week, we’ll dissect and benchmark different elements and portions of the platforms. For example, we’ll focus on the PCI Express Geforce 6800 GT that we have here on one day, we’ll dedicate a day to the 925X running both the Prescott 3.6 Ghz and the 3.4 Ghz Extreme Edition, a day for the 915 getting the same treatment and more. With only receiving the last of the necessary hardware for the benchmarks this past Thursday, there was no way for us to have all the thorough benchmarks you’d want this soon, so we’ll be taking care of you all week long.

Feature Descriptions

First, we’ll go over PCI Express (PCI-E), and the benefits it can bring to gamers. PCI-E X16 provides 4 GB/s of bandwidth in each direction (8 GB/s in full duplex mode) compared to the approximate shared bandwidth of 2.1 GB/s of AGP 8X. This means that while AGP 8X has to share the 2.1 GB/s bandwidth between reads and writes, PCI-E provides a dedicated 4 GB/s lane for read tasks and write tasks independent of each other to optimize it for handling more tasks. Couple this increased bandwidth with lower latencies and you have a very compelling reason to kiss AGP 8X goodbye.

While ATI has created separate cores that have native support for PCI-E, nVidia is currently using a bridge chip to translate the AGP functions over to PCI-E. It’s unknown how big the performance hit is using this method however. We’ll test both PCI-E parts, and their AGP 8X counterparts to see if we can unravel if there are any current benefits to using the new bus. As it stands, it will be a great bus for future graphics chips that are built from the ground up to take advantage of it.

We’ve been speaking of PCI-E X16 for graphics, but PCI-E X1 is also implemented on the motherboards. PCI-E X1 has a bandwidth of 500 MB/s and will be used as a replacement for PCI cards. This will be plenty of bandwidth for future sound cards, Ethernet cards and all the other add in cards you’d need in your system.

DDR2 finally makes its debut with these chipsets. While the speeds aren’t drastically higher than current DDR ram, DDR2 will have much more headroom than the aging standard. For the time being, DDR2 533 keeps the CPU fed with 8.5 GB/s of bandwidth. The i925X has ‘memory optimizations’ to help minimize latencies between the memory and CPU. While no one’s going into full detail about how this is achieved, it allows maintenance commands to be inserted into the data path to rearrange data stored in memory to optimize access times. Since only the i925X supports this feature, we’ll be able to see if it does indeed provide any benefits when we compare the 925 to the 915 in benchmark tests. Regardless of how large or small the current benefits are for using DDR2, it will scale better with future processors.

One more cool thing to note about the memory support in these chipsets is what is known as Intel Flex Memory Technology (IFMT). Ever since memory controllers have gone dual channel, consumers have had to be particular with the densities of ram they use to populate their ram slots. IFMT allows the controller to determine how much ram is in each channel. As an example, traditionally, if you had a 512 MB stick of ram in one channel, you would have to have put a 512 MB stick in the other channel as well. With IFMT, you could put two 256 MB sticks in one channel with one 512 MB stick in another channel. Chances are, anyone building a system with either of these chipsets would just use identical ram anyway, but it’s still cool to see the innovation there.

The i915 has the option to support the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900. The integrated core is the third generation of Intel Extreme Graphics. While the previous Intel Extreme Graphics chips supported DirectX 7.1, the 900 supports DirectX 9. It also supports hardware accelerated Pixel Shader 2.0 and a software accelerated Vertex Shader solution. The core is meant to compete with mainstream level discrete graphics cards such as nVidia’s Geforce FX 5200 and ATI’s Radeon 9200. It’s nice to see features such as Pixel Shader 2.0 being adopted as part of integrated graphics cores as it will give more gamers access to nicer effects in upcoming games. Even nicer, a gamer building a system out of an i915 motherboard can save money on using the integrated graphics core when first building the machine, and then put a discrete graphics card in the PCI-E X16 slot later after their wallet recovers.

The Intel High Definition Audio is very nice for an integrated audio chip. Being capable of 192 kHz with 24-bit 8-channel support, it’s the first integrated audio chip capable of 7.1 sound. All that matters to gamers is that without even needing to buy an add in sound card, you’ll be able to play all the latest games with support for Dolby Digital, DTS, THX and more. Heck, the motherboard even has a digital optical port on the back to allow interfacing with a multitude of audio devices and hardware. When plugged up to a set of Logitech Z 680s, it certainly did not disappoint in keeping that 500 Watts RMS of power well fed.

Another interesting feature is the Intel Matrix Storage Technology. Intel has improved upon the traditional RAID configuration options with this. Normally, most RAID users use RAID0 (striping configuration) for added performance, or they use RAID1 (mirror configuration) for added data protection. Either of these configurations require two hard drives. If someone wanted to have RAID0+1 to allow extra performance and protection, traditionally they’d need two disks for the striped information, and an additional two disks to mirror those disks. Buying four hard disks is out of the range of most users. What makes Intel Matrix Storage Technology intuitive is that it allows one to create a RAID0 volume across two hard disks, AND create a RAID1 volume across the SAME two disks. Giving users this flexibility at such a low cost is very cool indeed.

The Serial ATA Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) also includes support for hardware accelerated Native Command Queuing (NCQ). This allows a hard drive that also supports this feature to improve disk performance. This is accomplished by the hard disk optimally reordering commands in such a way that they’ll be able to execute in fewer revolutions than they normally would. The Maxtor drives used in this test setup support this feature. In addition to the 16 MB buffer found on these drives, other future innovations such as increased rotational speeds, SATA interfaces capable of 300 MB/s (which should start appearing next year) things are definitely shaping up to allow our hard drives to keep up with the technology curve. Bigger disks aren’t enough anymore; faster and more efficient disks are important too.

The Intel Wireless Connect Technology (IWCT) is pretty simple and very nice too. Basically, in four steps, you can turn your PC into a wireless router. The easy process configures internet connection sharing with firewall support, NAT and DHCP server duties. This is definitely a step in the right direction as more devices around the home and in our lives are outfitted with wireless technology. Kudos on this feature.

Benchmarks

Now we’re going to give you couple brief benchmarks. The system used for this test is comprised of:

Pentium 4 3.4 Ghz Extreme Edition LGA775

i925X Motherboard

2 X 512 MB Micron DDR2 533 Mhz

nVidia Reference Geforce 6800 GT PCI-Express

2 X 250 GB (16 MB buffer) Maxtor MaXLine III native SATA II Hard Drives (RAID0)

460 Watt BTX PSU

TDK VeloCD 52X CDRW

Futuremark’s 3DMark03:

11,337 Marks

Futuremark’s PCMark04:

CPU: 5,222

Memory: 5,356

HDD: 7,124

SiSoftware Sandra:

Dhrystone ALU: 10,458 MIPS

Whetstone FPU: 4,254 MFLOPS

Whetstone iSSE2: 7,563 MFLOPS

RAM Bandwidth Integer Buffered iSSE2: 4727 MB/s

RAM Bandwidth Float Buffered iSSE2: 4721 MB/s

Conclusion :

Based on the data from the preliminary tests that we’ve conducted so far, the i925/915 platforms look like very compelling solutions for PC gamers. Whether you’re a hardcore hardware junkie that has to upgrade every time the new top of the line comes out, or if you’re in the market for needing a new system, the features and forward looking technologies of these platforms should definitely make you consider them. We’re going back to the lab now to start cranking out more in depth benchmarks on what really matters to us here, games. Look forward to us getting in depth with nVidia and ATI’s latest PCI-E cards, more detail on performance gains from these smoking new Maxtor hard disks, differences in performance between the 925 and 915, and more. If there is anything that you guys would like to see us test or bench, be sure to let us know. Sound off below on the comments and we’ll be sure to address what you’d like to see in this week’s 925/915 blowout. Don’t miss it.