Intel Cape Cod mobo stinks

Yeah, we know you're all bored to death with Caminogate® stories, but this one will really get up Chipzilla's nose. The much-delayed, blah, blah, blah, i820 chipset finally saw the light of day in cut-down form, both the Rambus Vancouver (VC820) and SDRAM Cape Cod being restricted to a maximum of 512MB of RAM. There are still problems getting hold of the Rambus jobo, however. Because the i820 chipset was designed for Rambus, the PC100 CC820 mobo has a Memory Translator Hub (MTH) to act as a go-between for the CPU and the memory. And guess what? The MTH puts a hit on performance. A big hit. Postings on the Intel motherboard forum cite a memory performance degradation of between 30 and 40 per cent when moving from a BX mobo to a Cape Cod. The VC820 Rambus version should be a tad faster, but with RDRAM costing around four times as much as PC100 memory, you'd have to be bonkers to go down that route. Our advice? Stick with the BX chipset. It may be old, only support 100MHz FSB and AGP 2X, but hey, it works. ®