Intel's 975X still offers better clock for clock performance when compared to the P965 in most situations. Expect this to change to some degree as the P965 continues to mature, and additional BIOS tweaks such as 1T command rates should be fully working in the near future. The 975X's front side bus will not overclock as high as the P965, but due to relaxed MCH timings and memory strap changes it is difficult to take advantage of the higher P965 front side bus speeds without premium memory and cooling solutions.
The 975X also offers 8x8 CrossFire capability while the P965 has been limited to a 16x4 hybrid solution. Not discovered much difference in performance at the lower resolutions, but as game engines and future video cards require greater bandwidth then the P965's CrossFire performance will be hampered.
The one item that continues to be an almost daily issue is drive compatibility. Intel did just about everything right last year, but the one boneheaded decision they made was to introduce the P965/G965 chipsets without native IDE support.
In the meantime we have been left with a situation where the motherboard manufacturers had to increase the cost of their boards in order to include an additional IDE capable chipset, and with this they opened a can of worms. The additional complexity involved in getting a chipset like the JMicron JMB363 to play nice with Intel ICH8/R chipsets has proved to be difficult. While Biostar wisely chose the VIA VT6410 chipset for IDE availability at the expense of additional SATA ports, the balance of suppliers have gone the JMicron route. We feel like this is to gain an advantage on the feature checklist as you can have two additional SATA ports for either standard 3Gb/s or e-SATA support.
The auxiliary IDE and SATA support has come at an expense. There have been numerous problems getting the IDE drives to operate in modes other than PIO. There have been conflicts between the RAID operation on the JMicron and Intel ICH8R setups. The ability to use IDE optical drives and SATA drives together on the JMicron controller has caused problems numerous times. Even purchasing a SATA optical drive and using it on the Intel ICH8R controller with RAID enabled has been impossible on some boards. One of the most popular scenarios we witnessed and continue to see is to have RAID enabled on the Intel controller and IDE on the JMicron resulting in the RAID array not being seen. The other problem is enabling RAID on the JMicron setup and not being able to use an IDE drive or RAID on the Intel controller. The majority of these problems have been resolved through BIOS, firmware, or driver updates, but you just never know when it is going to be an issue.
Sh!t.........just go read Anandtech's article on the 965 boards.........and forget the 945. Useless.
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2914
Discussion Zen 5 Speculation (EPYC Turin and Strix Point/Granite Ridge - Ryzen 9000)
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