Thoughts
There was so much to cover in so little time. I'd have loved to have gone more in-depth on the PCI Express side of things and the Matrix Storage deserves more time spent, but the basic performance of the CPUs and chipsets available at the LGA775 launch were covered and they were the main article focus. Difficulty in obtaining graphics cards for the test system, the first arriving days after the kit arrived from Intel, meant that thumb twiddling and forward research were all that could be done. However once it was possible to delve into the performance and feature set of the new Pentium 4 platform, a few things became abundantly clear.Firstly, the new ICH6-series southbridges bring with them quite a few new forward-looking features. High Definition Audio is a step forward in the world of on-board system audio, giving consumers a very agreeable out-of-the-box audio solution, effectively for free, without having to spend a fortune on add-in cards of a high specification. Paired with a decent HDA CODEC, the new audio specification, on the surface of things, appears excellent. Time will bear that opinion out, but I have high hopes for HDA.
The Matrix Storage controller on the bridge, able to create disparate volume types inside the same disk array, is a welcome step forward in terms of your disk options on consumer hardware. With almost all forthcoming LGA775 motherboards equipped with at least the four native ICH6 ports, if not more (you'll get eight on DFI's upcoming products), SATA is in full swing and your connectivity options with ICH6 are plentiful.
Intel also bring WiFi straight into the consumer space on the ICH6W, thrusting that technology into the hands of the masses. How that pans out remains to be seen, with concerns about saturation of the 2.4GHz public bandwidth allocation, given the volume of ICH6W bridges that Intel plan to ship over the next couple of years, and beyond in future products. Enabling the WiFi functionality requires the use of a PCI add-in board which Intel will release to the market later in the year. First generation boards will have to do without.
The bridge also brings with it support for four PCI Express 1x lanes which most, if not all LGA775 motherboards to be released in the near future will provide slots for, even if it's just one. We await the peripherals that'll make use of it with open arms.
But past the excellent southbridge, there's seemingly very little to get excited about, given current costs. DDR-II DIMMs are the culprit, current dual-channel DDR-II 533MHz kits costing a heck of a lot more than established low latency DDR-I. With low latency memory a fine way to extract maximum performance on Canterwood and Springdale, at stock CPU speeds, the high latencies and high cost of DDR-II take a huge chunk away from what is otherwise a good looking package.
Overall performance is undoubtedly held back by the new memory standard and the memory controller itself, the Alderwood system with 3.4EE and Pentium 4 5xx-series CPUs singularly failing to beat the Canterwood Pentium 4 comparison system at any point. Comparable yes, but there's no increase, something that can't be stomached at the present time due to the high cost of entry to the Alderwood game.
I eagerly await DDR-I-powered Grantsdale systems with PAT-like enhancements, since those are the only things that would tempt me away from Socket 478 and a well tuned Canterwood board just now. The ICH6 can provide all the great features in the world, but if the rest of the platform costs you the earth and doesn't advance base performance, there's not much to sway you into an ICH6-equipped board purchase and the switch to LGA775.
While my own testing shows that the fears surrounding the operation of the socket itself are unfounded, my cack-handed penchant for mishandling hardware not troubling the new socket one bit, we also have to listen to the concerns of the mainboard manufacturers we talked to regarding the issue. Four first and second tier manufacturers have directly expressed their concerns over the fragility of the socket to HEXUS, with Intel apparently saying to them that five or six CPU swaps is the realistic upper limit before some kind of socket damage or failure. It's worth considering.
Looking forward, a drop in DDR-II prices and mass market retail availability of PCI Express graphics cards, alongside their AGP counterparts, may sway some people towards the delights an ICH6-equipped board will hold. Until then, if I were you, I'd be looking to stick with what I've got.
As a conduit to faster CPU speeds from a processor packaging point of view, we have to wait and see.
