DFI 855GME-MGF Motherboard Review - Bandwidth
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As for other features particular to this board, you can see the two DIMM slots. Being the micro ATX board that it is, there simply isn't room for more than that. It's also single channel, unlike the chipsets to be found on its big brother the P4, or the upcoming Alviso mobile platform. They are also DDR I, another difference from the current Intel desktop platforms. Considering the clock speed they are meant to run at -- 1:1 100MHz, 3:4 133MHz, or 3:5 166MHz -- there is absolutely no need to go with higher latency and more expensive DDR II until the frontside bus of the Pentium M gets a severe kick in the pants.
As we saw from my preview of the Pentium M, and which will be more evident in the benchmarks later in this review, the chip does have some bandwidth limitations affecting its performance. The i855 north bridge also powers an AGP 4X slot. While not being as sexy as an 8X slot would be, in the end it will perform just the same. Graphics solutions aren't exactly starving from this old standard. What it does mean though is that you'll not be able to use the newer PCIe based cards, so that does put a crimp on the "future proofing" of the board. Since the choices for DFI were "AGP 4X or nothing," it's a pretty easy decision.
Again, the upcoming Alviso does not have this same limitation. On the bright side though, it means I can keep using my old and tired ATi Radeon 8500. There is also a gigabit ethernet controller onboard, unfortunately pumped through the PCI bus. That's somewhat sad, considering it means that one of the ports for the PCI-X bus goes to waste, when that bandwidth would be better served by a high demand device like Gbe can be.
Next: Socket layer changes >>
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