Like most of you, I've been following the introduction of the new Intel 865/875-series motherboards with a great deal of interest. I'll be building a new server for work in the coming months, so naturally I have been thoroughly researching every newly released board so that I might make a good buy for the company.
What has really caught my eye is the utter number of I/O devices and features the manufacturers have been piling onto these boards. I've been following the motherboard industry for years and I've never seen such a plethora of onboard controllers, chipsets, and connectors (FireWire, 6-channel audio, USB, Serial ATA RAID, ATA/133 RAID, etc).
My question involves the number of devices versus the rather limited 133MB/sec of bandwidth provided by the PCI bus. In looking at the 875P block diagram (here), the schematic makes it look as if the ICH5 has numerous custom interfaces to the components via a dedicated bus (Hub Interface, AC '97, etc), designed to bypass the 'old' PCI bus altogether to free up bandwidth. But when I go into Device Manager and view all devices by connection, almost every device is still listed as running off of the PCI bus!!!
Can someone maybe clarify this a bit? I'm guessing that these diagrams are drawn more for clearly displaying the different features available on the chipset rather than their functional relationships to each other.
What has really caught my eye is the utter number of I/O devices and features the manufacturers have been piling onto these boards. I've been following the motherboard industry for years and I've never seen such a plethora of onboard controllers, chipsets, and connectors (FireWire, 6-channel audio, USB, Serial ATA RAID, ATA/133 RAID, etc).
My question involves the number of devices versus the rather limited 133MB/sec of bandwidth provided by the PCI bus. In looking at the 875P block diagram (here), the schematic makes it look as if the ICH5 has numerous custom interfaces to the components via a dedicated bus (Hub Interface, AC '97, etc), designed to bypass the 'old' PCI bus altogether to free up bandwidth. But when I go into Device Manager and view all devices by connection, almost every device is still listed as running off of the PCI bus!!!
Can someone maybe clarify this a bit? I'm guessing that these diagrams are drawn more for clearly displaying the different features available on the chipset rather than their functional relationships to each other.
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