What is an Intel 865g Motherboard?

What is an Intel 865g Motherboard?
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Motherboards

Motherboard design is an iffy manufacturing issue. Not only are you trying to work with existing technology, but to keep up with the competition, new features have to be introduced to make the technology more cutting edge. Typically, the technology involves having more speed, lesser power consumption, faster processors, and technology that is more integrated. These are not small elements. Market share dominance can be the result of putting all of these elements together.

Before Intel introduced the 865g Motherboard, it had been reluctant to undertake some riskier technologies. It had a conservative bent. Its main competitor for the last several years has been AMD. However, it released the motherboard with an 800MHz front side bus. The 800MHz front side bus established a performance advantage over comparable chipsets.

It also introduced two channels of 64-bit DDR400 memory. The DDR400 or double data rate is a memory transfer mode for data on a computer bus. The rationale behind DDR400 became apparent from the designs of earlier chipsets. In order to avoid a performance penalty associated with clock synchronization, Intel had to develop a memory bus to function as a derivative of the system bus. This meant that the memory system was coordinated with the system bus, and not run independently of it.

Additional information about motherboards is available at How Motherboard Technology Has Evolved.

Standard Features of the 865g Motherboard

The 865g Motherboard contains the following features:

  • One AGP slot. This is the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP), which is a high-speed operational point-to-point channel that is used to attach a video card to a computer’s motherboard. It acts primarily as an accelerator of 3D computer graphics.

  • There are six PCI or Peripheral Component Interconnect slots in the computer. These are bus devices that are used for attaching hardware devices in a computer. The CD/AUX/Modem audio input can be used to connect to external devices like modems, cd’s or wireless connections. It also has two Ultra DMA connectors for older hard drives, and 2 SATA connectors for the newer hard drive technology.

This technology is standard in that it was not so much innovative as it was a collection of expected features of the motherboard. In this environment, even if your system does what it is supposed to do, that may not be good enough. There are performance enhancements that are always expected. Faster is better. More processing capabilities is better. Lower cost is better. In other words, yesterday’s great motherboard may be only so-so today.

New Feature Set

The Intel 865G motherboard was released in 2003, and there were new features. The “G” in the name denotes that the silicon chip includes a graphics controller.

What makes the Motherboard impressive are the new features that are offered over the older model motherboards. For instance, the 865 chipset family has the following major advantages over the 845 family, the earlier motherboard version.

  • There is a dual-channel memory controller, which allows faster memory performance as well as a larger memory size limit, compared to earlier Intel Motherboards for handling larger amounts of data and more programs in RAM. Previously, most dual-channel architectures were set up to use expensive RIMM (Rambus) memory, but the 865 series uses mainstream DDR memory instead.

  • There is an optional Gigabit Ethernet support for faster network access on 10/100/1000 megabytes.

  • Ethernet networks have serial ATA support that provides faster hard disk performance and easier configuration. Also the optional serial ATA RAID 0 technology provides support for greater hard disk access speed.

It is a hub-based system with a NorthBridge equivalent memory controller (MCH) and a SouthBridge equivaltent I/O controller (ICH).

You can compare this information to other PC Motherboards for Intel and AMD CPUs to get additional details.

Summary

The Intel 865G motherboard was released in 2003 and was an improvement over the 845 family of motherboards. The new features improved the speed, processing power, and power management of the chipset. This made programs run faster, and at the same time use less power.

The 865 series of chipsets had the following models:

  • 865P
  • 865PE
  • 865G

(there is no plain 865 chipset)

It is hub-based, which includes a memory controller hub called MCH and is a North Bridge equivalent. It also has an I/O controller hub called ICH which is the South Bridge equivalent.

References

Source: The Intel 865 Chipset Family

Picture Credit : Hot Hardwareware