Intel 875P (Canterwood) Chipset - The New Flagship

Final Words

The 875P has clearly done its job of replacing the long-lived 850/850E at the top of Intel's Pentium 4 chipset line; not only has it done its job, but the 875P does its job quite well.

The beauty of the 875P chipset doesn't lie in its performance, because the performance we see here today we've seen for quite some time courtesy of the 850E chipset; no, the beauty of the 875P lies in its extensive feature set.

The support for dual channel DDR400 and 800MHz FSB are the types of improvements we expect to see with every new chipset generation, but with the 875P the moons just happened to be in proper alignment because we received features such as native Serial ATA support, Intel RAID and a very useful CSA bus for Gigabit Ethernet.

The performance improvement that the 875P offers over the 850E is negligible, assuming you're not transitioning to one of the newer 800MHz FSB CPUs. If you are making the transition to an 800MHz FSB CPU with Hyper Threading support, then the 875P migration makes the most logical sense, however upgrading from an 850E to an 875P with anything other than an 800MHz FSB CPU wouldn't be worth it.

When comparing the 875P to the 845PE, the two are clearly in very different classes, much like the 850E and 845PE were in two very different segments. The upgrade to an 875P from a 845PE platform will result in a somewhat noticeable performance boost, but where you start getting very serious performance gains is when you're talking about upgrading from something older than an 845PE (e.g. original 845, 845 DDR, etc…).

With that said, the 865 chipset may be the one to wait for; the 865 will be noticeably cheaper and only lacks Intel's PAT, which we've yet to come to a consensus on the usefulness of. We're already getting in 865 based motherboards for review, we'll shortly be able to give you all of the information you need to make the appropriate decision between the 875 and the 865. If the 865 performs anything like the 875P then SiS' 655 will almost inevitably be confined to the low-end of the market segment, but in the end the consumer benefits as having an entry-level dual channel DDR Pentium 4 chipset is nothing to complain about.

For now, kudos to Intel on a job well done with their latest line of Pentium 4 chipsets; times have definitely changed since Intel's series of chipset fumbles a couple of years back, and they have changed for the better.

Stay tuned for much more 875P coverage this week as we review the first shipping motherboards out of Taiwan…