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should we wait for canterwood ?

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totof

Registered
Joined
Feb 6, 2003
Like many of you, I am sure, I am contemplating my next upgrade.

While contemplating the purchase of an AMD and NForce2 based platform I realised that Intel's offerings weren't that much more expensive.

When I started reading a bit more about Intel's chips and supporting chipsets I also realised that these P4 do indeed overclock nicely.
I am not an hardcore OCer and don't intend to be but I don't mind these extra "easy to get" couple of MHz. Who doesn't really?

This finished convincing me. I am switching to Intel.

Simple I thought.
Just read the forums and pick your hardware to get the best perfs on your budget.
Hummm. that 2.4B P4 thingy looks nice...
Hummm. that P4PE does look nice too....
I am getting there...

Then the worse that can happen happened.
Someone linked me to an article mentioning the next generation of Intel products based on 200 MHz FSB
i.e. springdale and canterwood chipsets and P4/800 cpus

Wisely (sure!) and mostly because I (my finances rather) can do with waiting a bit I decided to...well...wait to see what these springdale/canterwood chipset can do.

here are some other factors that I have considered in an attempt to convince myself I had made the right choice.

- waiting is free and you can't go wrong
- newest platforms (eg Nforce2 for AMD) fail somehow to deliver stability at 200 MHz, at least without serious modifications. therefore why not wait for something designed to work at 200 MHz and avoid this nerve wracking soldering
- if the switch 200 MHz does not deliver much more perfs it will lower the price of current platforms


A couple of questions however reminds unanswered in my mind and i'd be curious to know what hardware gurus could comment on these or this topic in general.

Will the 200MHz chipsets be able to deliver more performances with current 133 MHz chips?
i.e. what will be the cost in terms of performances to run the memory and CPUs at different frequency?

Will the P4/800 CPUs (to be released in April) will be able to use all the dual DDR bandwidth or will we have to wait for the 1MB L2cache chips?
i.e. will this dual DDR400 memory support be for show

Thanks in advance for posting
 
pip,

I have been reading a bit more on the subject

if we look at what the granite bay (dual DDR266) delivers the canterwood will just be a killer platform.

I think I picked my next chipset.

is the Canterwood chipset still supposed to be released in March?

I can't wait to see the first benchmarks using p4/533 cpus.
and then, a little later, how will the p4/800 do.
 
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I figure the new stuff is going to be too expensive for me. The new Asus Granite Bay Board is about $230.00. The Gigabyte Granite Bay Board is even more. So, what will the new Canterwood or Springdale's be? Plus, how much for the new CPU's?

I have been considering going over my budget for the Asus Granite Bay because it has a lot of features. I am not sure, but at least I don't have to pay big bucks for a new CPU.

I think the right thing now, might be to get the Abit MAx 2.0, the Asus Granite Bay, or even a cheaper P4PE. Then in a year or two upgrade again, when a new level of CPU's and boards have been out for a little while and the prices will be cheaper.

I don't know though, *lol*. It's very tough to keep up with technology and price.
 
totof said:
that late?
Don't rely on info from Xbitlabs, they said Granite Bay boards would appear in November. The late May timeframe comes from an Intel guy, it's not my own estimate. It'd be nice to see Canterwood earlier but I'm not expecting it anytime soon. But then, these things are never 100% predictable so we'll just have to wait and see.:)
 
How about SMP P4s that hyperthread too?

"The successor of the E7205 (Granite Bay), the code-named CanterWood chipset will support [color=ff5500]dual Pentium 4 processors[/color] with 533MHz and 667MHz Quad Pumped Bus, 1MB of L2 cache and the Hyper-Threading II technology. The core-logic will feature ICH5 with Serial ATA support. Moreover, the platform will provide Gigabit Ethernet and dual Gigabit Ethernet controllers."

Full story:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/story.html?id=1035656883
 
I was surprised to see that using SiS655 and dual DDR400 and DDR333 could improve perfs (a little) over dual DDR266 which theoretically supplied all the bandwidth that the P4 can handle.
(see link in baraka post)

Again the gain are minimal not to say negligable.
I think it is fair to say that
(SiS 655-Dual DDR400)=(850E-PC1066)=(SiS 655-Dual DDR333)=(E7205-Dual DDR266)

For people like me with good DDR266 in their current system.
the savings by avoiding to get new memory can largely compensate for the chipset extra cost as well as allow you to go from let's say an 2.4B to 2.66B.

the only problem I see with that route is the fact that DDR266 won't allow much room for FSB overclocking and that even if good DDR266 memory can allow you to go above 133FSB you'll still have to compromise with CAS2.5 latency.

Regarding the P4/800 on canterwood it is clear to say that the extra bandwidth available to the CPU might not make that much of a difference.
Moreover, like for the NForce2 chipset, the dual DDR capability is not likely to make a lot of difference

HOWEVER, one has to wait and see what are the benefit from having synchronised CPU and MEM.
I think that's what will really make the canterwood+P4/800 option stand out.

I definitely think that I will wait to see what this combo delivers before I upgrade.

Once out hopefully reviewers will be able to show us what the canterwood delivers both with P4/533 and P4/800 CPUs.

I expect the Canterwood to be a great success not only for the reasons above but also because it will allow P4/533 owner to get that extra edges as well as (as I anticipate) p4/800 buyer to get the fastest platform around.

The next 3 months will be very interesting indeed.
 
micamica1217 said:

maybe the springdale will have memory ratios.
Springdale/Canterwood should feature the following memory ratios............

(FSB:MEM)
1:1 - duh.
3:4 - For DDR266 support @ 400FSB
4:5 - For DDR333 support @ 533FSB
5:4 - For DDR333 support @ 800FSB (DDR actually runs at DDR320)

Looks pretty flexible to me.:D
 
should we wait yes,and no if we always wait we will never get anything,we will wait for centerwood but when that comes out why not wait for the next thing 2 months after LoL,just gotta take the dive when it seems right
 
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