The New Intel i9x5 Chipsets

Fast forwarding from the i8xx chipsets, the brand-new i9x5 series introduces many new features that only techies would have heard of, like the new LGA (Land Grid Array) 775 socket, PCI Express x16 support, dual channel DDR2 support and Intel's High Definition Audio. The table below shows the differences between the Intel i875P and the latest i9x5 Express chipsets.

From the table above, you can see that Intel has abandoned support for their 533MHz FSB processors with the advent of the i925X chipset. This is pretty much the same thing they did with the i875P chipset which dropped support for the older 400MHz FSB processors.

In addition, the i925X will only support DDR2, while its lower-end brother, the i915 will support both DDR and DDR2. Both the i915 and i925 chipsets will come with four SATA channels and one ATA100 channel, which will automatically provide support for a maximum of six devices!

And in an attempt to catch up with NVIDIA's Soundstorm initiative, Intel has decided to improve the onboard sound with their High Definition Audio which supports up to eight audio channels and audio fidelity of up to a sampling rate of 192KHz and 32-bits of accuracy.