Intel 865 (Springdale) Chipset: Mainstream Dual DDR

Final Words

From our 875P Review you should already understand the majority of the technical benefits of the 865 line of chipsets, and as our 533MHz/DDR333 benchmarks have shown, the performance of the 865PE chipset is strong enough that pursuing the 875P platform for anything but a 800MHz FSB CPU is unnecessary.

But what about if you plan on upgrading to a 800MHz FSB CPU or will be using one from the start? and the following chart should summarize the performance improvements we've seen:

For the most part the 865PE comes within 2 - 5% of the performance of the 875P, which makes the 875P a tough sell. For the majority of users, we would strongly recommend the 865PE because of the significant cost savings. If you're the type of user that must have the fastest thing on the block and will not rest without the knowledge that you do in fact have the fastest thing on the block, then the 875P is for you, but for everyone else, the 865PE is more than sufficient.

The 865PE's competitiveness at 800MHz/DDR400 with Intel's flagship makes it more than just a desireable chipset, but arguably the best mainstream chipset ever to come out of Intel's labs.

The biggest drawback at this point are the memory incompatibility issues at DDR400 speeds, something which we honestly expected much better out of Intel - especially considering that we haven't encountered any of these problems with other DDR400 chipsets (e.g. nForce2). We are hard at work figuring out the memory incompatibility issues right now, until those are resolved your best bet is to check with the Forums and keep visiting to see what memory you should be using with 875/865 motherboards and at what timings.