The Intel Springdale

The Intel Springdale i865 chipset is actually a mainstream chipset, compared to the Intel i875 (Canterwood) chipset which is considered as a performance chipset. The main difference between the Intel i865 and Intel i875 chipsets are the Performance Acceleration Technology (PAT) and ECC memory support which are found only in the i875 chipset.

Currently, there are four different chipsets in the Intel i865 family :-

• Intel 865G
• Intel 865GV
• Intel 865PE
• Intel 865P

Those chipsets come with either an Intel ICH5 or Intel ICH5R south bridge. The Intel ICH5 is the basic south bridge chip while the Intel ICH5R comes with additional RAID support.

The Intel i865P chipset, being the earliest Springdale chipset, supports only 400/533MHz FSB processors. The other chipsets support 400/533/800MHz FSB processors. The Intel i865P chipset is also the only chipset with a memory bus that officially supports operation of up to 333MHz. The other i865 chipsets support a memory bus of up to 400MHz.

The Intel i875 chipset, in contrast, does not support 400MHz FSB processors but that is nothing to worry about as most Pentium 4 processors are 533/800MHz FSB processors. So, only the Intel Celeron Processor cannot be used together with the Intel i875 chipset. But that's perfectly alright since it doesn't make sense to pair a budget processor with a performance chipset.

The Intel i865GV chipset is similar to Intel i865G chipset in that both come with built-in graphics circuitry in the form of Intel's Extreme Graphics 2. However, the Intel i865GV chipset does not support any external graphics card.