i845E boards?

[tweakwtf]

Well, I'm about to make a purchase in the next week or so. I'm thinking of buying the Soyo P4i fire dragon for its excellent list of features and good overclocking results that I've seen.

But...845E should be out soon. Does anyone see any advantages to waiting for this chipset or know of any boards coming out? I feel like there are probably some pretty cool boards in the works, after seeing latest offerings such as the IT7 from abit. I'm also impressed with some of the athlon boards, particularly the Soyo platinum board with kt333. The more features in the board the better, I can't afford separate pci cards for sound, etc. but will be getting new graphics, so I don't care about 845g chipset.

Is the 845E chipset even a big deal since 133mhz bus can easily be reached on 845d boards?

 

[SolrFlare24]

From what I've seen in terms of benchmarks the 845E and 845G chipsets get better performance when paired with DDR333(yes its not officially supported but it does work ) than both the older 845 chipsets and the previous p4 speed king the SIS 645 chipset.

And while you may not be interested in integrated graphics, the benchmarks show the 845G chipsets as having even better performance than the 845E. Why you ask? Because with the integrated graphics on board the system's memory bandwidth has been tweaked out much like the N-force boards. Only in this case, unlike the nforce boards the 845g boards show all around improvement in memory bandwidth.

Fact of the matter is until SIS releases their next P4 chipset this mid-fall which will have PC3000 support built into it, the fastest DDR chipsets will be from fastest to slowest:

845G
845E
SIS 645
Older 845s

If you are not in a big hurry, wait a couple more weeks before you make your purchse as the 845e and G chipsets should be announced by month's end and seeing as sites already have review samples, the mobos will probably be on the market shortly thereafter. That way you can get some good benchmarks in and make your choice based on that.

With the E and G chipsets getting the best DDR peformance to date according to reports, no sense going out and buying a mobo within the next week only to see something that should be much better hit the market a week later. If anything, once they do hit the market, and if you feel they are too pricey, it should at least drop the prices on the current mobo's out there so you can get a good deal.