Introduction

The Pentium 4 processor has always benefited much from the RDRAM technology as RAMBUS technology could provide the large bandwidth necessary to compute huge chunks of data at high speed. The Pentium 4 now runs at 2.80GHz and at that speed, any other memory formats would probably not bring out the best in the processor simply because performance bottlenecks at the memory bus.

The Intel 850 chipset is probably one of the best Pentium 4 chipsets around but it seldom receive the kind of limelight as its 845 counterparts. This is probably due to the fact that RAMBUS memory technology has been the bane of every DIYer since it was launched during the Intel 820 era. The RDRAM technology then was simply not up on-par with the PC133 SDRAM. This has created a whole slew of negative publicity for RAMBUS and its sky-high pricings did not help it either. Fortunately, RDRAM prices have fallen drastically over the many months and it has become more affordable for the general consumer. In fact, PC800 memory now only cost a little more than DDR333 memory.

The PC800 RDRAM memory is not really that fast when used alone in a single channel. With one channel, you're getting only 1.6GB/s of bandwidth and that's about the same bandwidth offered by DDR200 memory. The secret lies in the Intel 850 chipset's architecture where it addresses the RDRAM memory banks in pairs (or in 2 channels at a time). This effectively doubles the memory bandwidth and consequently pushing it up to 3.2GB/s.

The Intel 850E chipset is a new revision of the Intel 850. Its features remain the same except that it now officially support Pentium 4 processors running at 533MHz FSB. It still supports PC800 RDRAM but unofficially, motherboard makers have found it to run rock stable with PC1066 RDRAM. Although Intel did not specify any support for PC1066, you can ask any user and they'll tell you that you should have no problems running with PC1066 memory.

Today, we have the Gigabyte GA-8IHXP motherboard which is based on the Intel 850E chipset. Let's look at the technical specifications shown in the table below:-