(http://www.trustedreviews.com/)Review Usually little happens at weekends in the world of computers, but for some reason, Intel has today decided to launch a completely new PC platform. Today's launch will impact the way PCs work for the foreseeable future with a wide range of new technologies that will, over time replace many of the things we're used to seeing in a PC, writes Lars-Goran Nilsson.

What we have here is the biggest change since PCI appeared and with PCI Express set to replace both PCI and AGP as the future standard interface for add-on cards, it might just be time to get a new computer. This does of course mean new chipsets and Intel is ready with its 925X, 915P, 915G and 915GV chipsets, previously known as Alderwood and Grantsdale. I will go into more detail on these new chipsets a bit later on, but let's look at what else is new.

As well as the implementation of PCI Express, Intel has also seen it fit to change the CPU socket and memory in one fell swoop. The new CPU socket is known as Socket-T and the new processors will be of LGA775 type. LGA stands for Land Grid Array and means that there are no pins on the bottom of the CPU, although there are still contact surfaces - no less 775 of them. The CPU interface has been moved to the motherboard socket and this is a way for Intel to get fewer returns in terms of damaged CPUs due to bent or broken pins.

There is still a group of capacitors at the bottom of the CPU that can be easily damaged if you place the chip with the contact surface facing downwards, so it's best to rest the processor on its back if you have to place it on a desk or table.

The downside here is that with 775 tiny pads on the end, the chance of a damaged CPU socket on the motherboard has suddenly increased significantly. But for Intel this is a minor issue, since although Intel sells motherboards, most motherboards are from companies such as Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, Abit and every other Taiwanese board maker, and it's these companies that will end up with all the returns. But then what's a motherboard company going to do, not support Intel CPUs? That's hardly likely.

Intel does however state that the new CPU socket is good for 20 insertions before any wear and tear damage occurs. As long as you're careful when you insert the CPU there is little reason to worry. All the new Socket-T motherboards come with a socket protector that has to be removed before you fit the CPU. This is to prevent damage to the pins inside the CPU socket before the chip is inserted.

The socket itself has to be opened before the CPU can be inserted and is closed with a latch that holds the processor in place. With a socket change, new CPU coolers are needed and this time around the retention mechanism we've been so used to, has been completely removed. Instead the new coolers are attached with four push pins that go through four holes in the PCB. Now this might not seem like such a bad thing on the surface, but CPU coolers have become very heavy lately and the way these new ones attach to the motherboard concerns me slightly. With a very heavy CPU cooler attached to the PCB without a rear plate to clamp it to, we could see damaged boards in PCs during "bumpy" deliveries. As it is we've had many PCs arrive at our offices with detached heatsinks due to rough transit.

Apart from that, the new cooler design is vastly improved - for one, you don't end up with your processor stuck to the bottom of the heatsink if you remove it from the board, which again reduces possible damage to the CPU. The biggest change however is the new fan connector, which is now four-pin rather than three-pin - this allows the PC to automatically adjust the fan speed depending on the CPU temperature. This feature has been a long time coming and pretty much every PC owner will be glad of dynamic fan control as it will reduce the amount of ambient noise produced by the system.

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Let's move on to the new memory, DDR2. This memory has received a lot of hype lately from various sources, not just Intel. Interestingly enough AMD has decided to stick with DDR400 for the time being, presumably waiting to see what will actually happened to DDR2 and to see how well it will do.

All the major memory manufacturers such as Micron/Crucial, Corsair, Samsung, Hynix, Infineon and so on are backing DDR2. Initial pricing is at about 90% more than equivalent DDR400 memory, but DDR2 for consumer PCs is rated at 533MHz so some of the higher cost is justified by the higher frequency. It is still a lot to swallow though, especially as initial tests show that DDR2 doesn't offer any huge advantages over DDR in terms of overall system performance.

The advantage is that DDR2 is far more scaleable than DDR and there are already predictions of DDR2 running at 667MHz before the end of this year. This would require new chipsets yet again and so far the only official backer is SiS which claims that it will have chipsets ready by the end of the year.

But fast memory is not just about frequency and DDR2 has very poor memory timings, typically set to 4-4-4-8 compared to 3-4-4-8 for DDR400 at JEDEC spec. But many memory manufacturers offer modules with far lower memory timings such as 2.5-3-3-7 or even as low as 2-2-2-5. This kind of memory is, of course far more expensive than normal DDR400 sticks, but the lower latency does generally improve overall system performance.

There is of course a point at which higher frequency outweighs lower latency and this is somewhat true with DDR2. Hopefully with improved manufacturing techniques DDR2 memory timings will drop and we'll see faster DDR2 memory appear later on this year.

So, we've covered the basics now and it's time to move on to what really matters, the new chipsets. Let's start from the top and work our way down from the 925X to the 915 range.

The 925X is the replacement for the 875P as Intel's flagship chipset and offers similar features. As you would expect it has an improved memory controller and support for ECC memory - something you won't find with the 915 series. The remaining features are similar across range with support for x16 PCI Express for graphics cards and four x1 PCI Express lanes that can be shared between various onboard components and PCI Express x1 slots. The only difference being the 915GV that doesn't feature the x16 PCI Express slot for graphics cards.

All of the new chipsets supports four memory slots for a maximum of 4GB of DDR2 memory. Intel also now only supports a single IDE connector, but you'll find four S-ATA connectors with support for Intel's new Matrix RAID, which I will cover in more detail later. Next there is support for High Definition Audio, which I will also expand on a little later.

More common features such as PCI are still supported and so are up to eight USB 2.0 ports, 800MHz bus speed and Hyper Threading.

The 915G and GV chipsets will also feature the new Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900, which will replace the Intel Extreme Graphics 2 seen on the 865G chipset. We will follow up with a review of this at a later date, as we're still waiting for a motherboard with integrated graphics to arrive from Intel.

This leaves the 915P which will replace the 865PE chipset and is a cut down version of the 925X as per the 865PE to the 875P.

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To complement the new chipsets is the new range of ICH6 South Bridges and this is really where you will find a lot of the new technology. The most basic version doesn't have support for RAID, as with the previous generation, ICH5, but this time around there will also be an ICH6W, which adds support for Wi-Fi. However, the most interesting version is the ICH6R which adds Intel's new Matrix Storage Technology.

This allows for some new types of RAID configurations that so far have not been possible. The Matrix RAID is in fact RAID 0+1 on two hard drives; a feat achieved by having two partitions on the hard drives. Each drive holds data as well as a backup, which means that as long as only one drive fails you still have all your data, but you also gain some of the performance benefit that you would get from a RAID 0 system.

Intel has made it very easy to set up a RAID configuration as it can all be done in Windows. You can even make a RAID from an existing Windows installation on a single drive by adding a second hard drive at a later stage, as long as it is identical to the first unit.

Another much talked about improvement is Native Command Queuing which allows the hard drive to decide how to store and read the data from the platters. This reduces the amount of revolutions the hard drive has to perform in order to store the same amount of data, which in turn improves the overall hard drive performance.

Intel is touting High Definition Audio as one of its major selling points and to be honest, no one is really going to be missing AC'97. The High Definition Audio standard supports 192kHz 24bit 8-channel audio which is a real step up from the fairly basic specifications of AC'97.

What's more, it supports more advanced microphone arrays with up to 16 elements that allow for better voice recognition, although that kind of microphone doesn't come cheap. Another feature that has been added is improved jack retasking, which should allow you to plug in any device to any audio jack and allow the motherboard to correctly detected and assign an input our output device. In practice this might not work as well as Intel hopes, as it does depend on how well the motherboard manufacturers implement the feature. Due to time limitations I did not manage to check how well it works, but I will follow up on this shortly.

In terms of test kit, Intel supplied us with a 925XCV which is Intel's top of the range motherboard based, as the name implies on the 925X chipset. The board features four memory slots for DDR2, four PCI slots, an x16 PCI Express slot and two x1 PCI Express slots. It does of course come with ICH6R to allow for Matrix RAID. A Realtek ALC880 7.1-channel HD Audio codec caters for the sound, but there are only five audio jacks at the back panel, which means that the line in jack is reconfigured if you are using the full 7.1-channel output. There are also optical and coaxial S/PDIF outputs, four USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port and an Ethernet connector around the back, and let's not forget the two PS/2 ports and the single serial and parallel ports.

One final important change to the new motherboards is the power supply requirements, as you now need an EPS PSU, which features a 24-pin power connector instead of the 20-pin ATX power connector that most PSUs have. There are however converters that can be used, as long as you have a good enough PSU to start with. The Intel 925XCV board allows for a standard ATX PSU to be used, as long as you plug in one of the four-pin Molex plugs into the extra socket next to the 12V AUX connector towards the rear of the motherboard.

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We've finally reached the critical point, and ask the inevitable question - how does it all perform? To be honest, I have to say that I expected it to be a little faster, especially with the hype Intel has been spreading over the past few months. As it happens I received a retail motherboard (a full review of which will be up shortly) with the 865PE chipset and a Socket-T, which we tested with very similar components and the numbers where almost identical in SYSmark 2004 with the 925X platform being one single point ahead.

However, this doesn't tell the whole story as both systems where tested with a single Maxtor 250GB S-ATA drive which Intel supplied as part of the test kit. The Maxtor drives support Native Command Queuing and have a massive 16MB cache and should have removed any bottle necks usually associated with slow hard drives. Sadly, we didn't get the time to test these drives in a RAID configuration as yet, but expect this to follow shortly when we bring you a review of a retail board. That said, we did configure a RAID array on an existing Windows installation, and although it took three hours to migrate, it all appeared to work fine when it had finished.

In PCMark 2004 the 925X platform did take the lead and the improvement of Native Command Queuing is very clear here as the hard drive score was up by almost 700 points which makes the new Maxtor drive the single fastest drive we have tested to date. This is very impressive and clearly shows the benefits of Native Command Queuing (coupled with a fast drive).

The 3D results are somewhat lower than those achieved with the 865PE board and an AGP version of the Nvidia GeForce 6800 GT graphics card that was used to test both platforms. There are surely many reasons that one could attribute to this result - some would blame Nvidia's AGP to PCI Express bridge chip, but I would presume that the performance deficit is mostly down to immature PCI Express drivers. The scores are not completely off the wall and with a bit of tweaking I'm sure that Nvidia will get them up on par with its AGP cards. Something worth pointing out here is the new six-pin power connector that you will see on all PCI Express graphics cards that draw more than 75W of power. This connector should appear on new power supplies shortly.

All in all there is a lot of new technology to digest and if you have been putting off buying a new computer, now might be the time that you should consider looking at putting your money on the table, as it will be quite some time before we see another dramatic change to the PC architecture. Intel has once again proven that it is moving the PC platform forward and many of the new features bring with them great benefits in performance and usability.

It will take a few months for the market to settle now that all the new technology has gone live, but once it does there will be a lot of choice and some good deals to be had. AMD is unlikely to be standing still for very long, and we're fully expecting to see PCI Express support for AMD processors in the next few months.

We'll be looking at an Intel 915G motherboard and taking a closer look at some PCI Express graphics cards in the coming week, so be sure to check back for the ongoing coverage of the new PC revolution. ®