This is an era of rich media for both home and business. But multimedia and real time 3-D applications-ripping CDs, playing the latest 3-D computer games, authoring multimedia content, and the like-require substantial memory bandwidth, which has demanded high-end systems, in the past.

Intel is altering that equation with the launch of the 865PE chip set, formerly codenamed Springdale. The Santa Clara chip giant recently introduced the 875P, its new dual-channel chip set that lets high-end systems use DDR400 memory. (See "Intel Opens Up Headroom with Canterwood" and "Intel Hits a Home Run"). The high-end desktop systems the 875P targets typically cost $2,000 or more.

About seven months ago, nVidia released their nForce2 chipset that supported dual-channel DDR333. This gave AMD the edge over Intel's 845PE which only supported single-channel DDR333. Intel responded to that threat with the release of the Springdale chipset. Since then, Intel has split the Springdale into two different chipsets: the 865 (Springdale) and the 875 (Canterwood). The primary difference between the two chipsets is that the Canterwood features PAT, which is touted to improve performance. The Springdale will be the cheaper of the two chipsets, focused towards the mainstream market. With the announcement of the Springdale new, AOpen has released a brand new motherboard, the AOpen AX4SG Max. AOpen has pulled out all of the stops on this motherboard, which is representative of the quality that AOpen puts into all their motherboards.

I know many of you will be wanting to know about OCing a Springdale board as opposed to a Canterwood. The particular IS7-G that I got from ABIT last week will run at an impressive 300MHz+ FSB.

After launching the i875P (codename Caterwood) chipset about one month ago, Intel pushes out the budget version of the same silicon wrapped in more humble clothes. Featuring a reduced package size with lower pin count and stripped of some features relating either to performance (PAT) or else to data integrity (ECC), the new 865 chipset family comes at approximately 30% savings over the more expensive Canterwood chipset.