New Intel Chipsets Worth Waiting For

[method77]

Intel plans on releasing two new chipsets in the next month with features which technophiles may want to wait for. AMD also plans on using the same technologies Intel is integrating. One feature Intel is using is a PCI Express system bus.

The standard PCI bus sends data one way for up to 133 megabytes per second while the PCI Express can transfer data both ways, reaching speeds of 500 MBps. An Accelerated Graphics Port is included in the chipset. DDR2 memory will be needed.

Intel also is using RAID which allows users to use two hard disks as one. A new feature called "Wireless Connect" will allow for easier networking at 802.11b/g. The only drawback is one has to leave the PC on to run the network.

Info taken from PCworld

[Bombardier]

This is good news all around ;)

This means that the current chipsets will drop in price again. That's good news for consumers :good job:

[Lord_of_the_Dense]

Definitely good news considering I plan on a new computer soon. :D

[Pablo]

I just bought two new boards a month ago.

Oh well you can never really buy at the right time can ya?

Anybody want to buy some boards?

[Stuzb]

Intel also is using RAID which allows users to use two hard disks as one

Firstly, that's part of the point of RAID and secondly... the 'Disk Management' within the 'Computer Management' applet as part of the control panel within Windows 2000 & XP allows drives to be mapped as one, and with any type of drive, ATAPI (ATA), Serial (SATA), or SCSI, and they support RAID levels 0 and 1 (both mirroring and duplexing techniques) whilst NT/2000 server editions also support RAID level 5.

MS refer to this as 'Dynamic disks' and although it's software based, and probably eats into CPU overhead (though I've not noticed any CPU usage personally), I just thought it should be worth noting that Intel aren't the first to support the RAID technique without extra hardware expense - needing specific SCSI drives and a SCSI controller.

It seems odd that Intel should be pushing this as some sort of technological feature, but it may be aiming from a hardware POV and in that case may be the first to offer RAID support as 'standard' as it were.