Riding the G965 Express
Although the GMA X3000 is undoubtedly the star of Intel's integrated graphics chipset, the G965 Express packs plenty of other goodies under the hood. At the north bridge, you'll find support for front-side bus speeds up to 1066MHz. The G965 also features a dual-channel DDR2 memory controller that supports speeds up to DDR2-800. The G965 Express will face off largely against chipsets built for AMD processors. Those processors feature on-die memory controllers, which means their accompanying chipsets don't need memory controllers of their own.

If you'd prefer to avoid the G965's integrated graphics, the north bridge is equipped with enough PCI Express lanes for a standard x16 slot. The G965 doesn't actually have as much north bridge PCIe connectivity as competing chipsets from AMD and Nvidia, but it more than makes up the difference at the south bridge.

Getting to the south bridge involves negotiating the chipset's Desktop Management Interface (DMI) interconnect, which offers 2GB/s of bandwidth. That doesn't quite match the 8GB/s of bandwidth available with Nvidia's GeForce 6150 chipset, but Intel uses the very same interconnect in its mid-range and high-end P965 and 975X chipsets, so it should be able to handle whatever the G965 throws at it.

The G965 Express north bridge is typically paired with Intel's ICH8 south bridge, which is a feature-reduced version of the ICH8R common on mid-range and high-end boards. Losing the R, in this case, costs you support for multi-drive RAID arrays. AHCI support is also missing from the vanilla ICH8, and since Intel implements Native Command Queuing (NCQ) through AHCI, you lose that, as well.

We understand there's little need for RAID support in a budget integrated graphics chipset, but we wish Intel hadn't axed AHCI. If implemented well, Native Command Queuing can be a very good thing, and it's a much smarter way to access a hard drive. We also wish that Intel hadn't dropped ATA support from its ICH8 series south bridge chips. Don't get us wrong—we're eager to see the end of awkward IDE ribbons. However, Intel jumped the gun a little on this one. When the ICH8 was introduced, SATA optical drives were few and far between, and only a few models are widely available even now. Motherboard makers have had to resort to third-party storage controllers to retain ATA support, and the JMicron chips most commonly used have compatibility problems with older versions of Ghost and some boot images.

Intel makes up for the ICH8's missing RAID, AHCI, and ATA support with a couple more SATA ports than the competition. However, that doesn't mean motherboard manufacturers will bother implementing all of them; most of the G965 Express boards we've seen have only four SATA ports.

On the PCI Express front, the ICH8 serves up an additional six lanes to complement the 16 available at the north bridge. That leaves the chipset with plenty of connectivity options for expansion slots and onboard peripherals. At least one of those PCIe lanes will probably need to be dedicated to an onboard Gigabit Ethernet controller, since Intel doesn't integrate one into the ICH8.

Update &mdash Some of Intel's datasheets incorrectly indicate that the ICH8 lacks support for AHCI, but Intel tells us that's not the case. The ICH8 apparently does support AHCI, and thus NCQ as well, but an AHCI driver is required. That driver is supposedly built into Windows Vista, but we're awaiting confirmation on whether an equivalent exists for Windows XP. In either case, our ICH8-equipped P5B-VM motherboard lacks the necessary BIOS switch to enable AHCI.