Test notes
You'll want to note several things about our test system configurations below. First, we've included mostly chipsets with dual-channel memory designs, with the exception of the Intel 845PE. If you want to see how the various single-channel chipsets compare, please see this review, where we test seven different P4 chipsets against each other. The 845PE won that comparison outright, which earned it the chance to be our single-channel P4 chipset representative today.

Next, the processor speeds we've tested are slightly different. The 875P is the only platform to use the Pentium 4 3.0GHz CPU with 800MHz bus support. We tested the rest of the P4 chipsets with a P4 3.06GHz processor, which gives the other guys a 66MHz processor clock speed advantage over the 875P.

Don't worry. They're gonna need it.

The 875P was the only board we tested with Kingmax memory, which is the memory that came with the board. Our attempts to use some Corsair paired, low-latency DDR400 DIMMs didn't work out well. That seems a little odd, because those paired Corsair DIMMs have been very impressive in other motherboards, especially nForce2 boards, even at high clock speeds and aggressive timings. The Intel 875P board was definitely happier with the Kingmax RAM that Intel bundled with it. I expect these things will be worked out by RAM and mobo makers over time, but I thought it was worth noting.

Also, since the 875P is the only chipset so far with native Serial ATA support, we tested the 875P with a Serial ATA drive, Seagate's Barracuda V. We tested the other chipsets with the ATA/100 version of the same drive.

Another thing: we tested the 875P's RAID 0 capabilities with Business and Content Creation Winstone. When we did so, we used a pair of SATA Seagate Barracuda V drives with a 128K stripe size, which is the stripe size Intel recommends.

Finally, the Gigabyte motherboard we selected as our SiS 655 representative turned out to be a bit frustrating, because its BIOS didn't offer manual memory tuning options. We might have seen a little bit better performance out of the SiS 655 had we been able to tune the memory timings.

Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least twice, and the results were averaged.

Our test systems were configured like so:

All tests on the P4 systems were run with Hyper-Threading enabled.

Thanks to Corsair for providing us with memory for our testing. If you're looking to tweak out your system to the max and maybe overclock it a little, Corsair's RAM is definitely worth considering.

The test systems' Windows desktops were set at 1024x768 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

• Cachemem 2.65MMX
• SiSoft Sandra Standard 2003 (2003.3.9.44)
• Compiled binary of C Linpack port from Ace's Hardware
• ZD Media Business Winstone 2002 1.0.1
• ZD Media Content Creation Winstone 2002 1.0.1
• Cinebench 2003
• Sphinx 3.3
• LAME 3.92
• Xmpeg 4.5 with DivX Video 5.03
• FutureMark 3DMark03
• Unreal Tournament 2003 demo benchmark
• Comanche 4 demo benchmark
• Quake III Arena v1.31
• Serious Sam SE v1.07
• SPECviewperf 7.1

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.