The chips behind the board

Our review of Intel's 875P chipset should cover everything you want to know about Canterwood, so I'll just quickly highlight some of the chipset's more important features and capabilities.

A quad-pumped 800MHz front-side bus, AGP 8X, CSA-attached networking, and support for dual-channel DDR400 memory with ECC are some of Canterwood's more notable features. The 875P's memory controller also has an aggressive set of memory timings, termed PAT (Performance Accelerating Technology), that boosts memory bandwidth and system performance quite nicely.

Recently, motherboard manufacturers have figured out how to enable PAT-like memory timings in Springdale-based products. The performance of Springdale boards with PAT-like timings has been quite impressive, which has made many wonder if there's any value in the Canterwood chipset beyond its support for ECC memory. There is, or at least there probably will be. It's expected that Intel will take additional steps to disable PAT-like timings in Springdale-based products. Those steps will probably include hardware changes within the 865PE's memory controller that will break any potential for PAT-like timings in future Springdale-based motherboards.

Like most manufacturers, Soyo pairs the 875P north bridge with Intel's ICH5R south bridge chip. In addition to its storage capabilities, which I'll get into in a minute, the ICH5R south bridge supports eight USB ports, 5.1-channel audio, and 10/100 Fast Ethernet. Of those three south bridge features, the SY-P4I875P taps only the chip's USB support, and then only six of its available eight ports (the extra two ports are used by an included memory card reader). The SY-P4I875P's Firewire duties are handled by VIA's popular VT6306 Firewire controller, which serves up three IEEE 1394 Firewire ports.

Instead of using the ICH5R's integrated 10/100 Fast Ethernet, Soyo wisely opted for CSA-attached Gigabit Ethernet. Through Intel's new CSA interface, Soyo can hang a Gigabit Ethernet chip right off the 875P north bridge and completely bypass the north/south bridge interconnect. Since Canterwood's 266MB/s of available interconnect bandwidth must already be shared by the SY-P4I875P's three RAID chips, integrated audio, and USB and Firewire ports, tying the board's Ethernet capabilities directly to the north bridge makes a lot of sense. Soyo's use of CAS should result in more consistent network performance.

On the audio front, Soyo joins the small group of manufacturers not using Realtek's ALC650 codec chip. Instead, Soyo has chosen C-Media's CMI8738 5.1-channel audio chip. The CMI8738 has ADC and DAC functionality built right in, so it doesn't need to rely on an external codec chip when dealing with analog signals. On paper, the CMI8738 is comparable to the vast majority of integrated audio solutions. The CMI8738 doesn't have the real-time Dolby Digital encoding capabilities of NVIDIA's nForce2 APU or the 24-bit/96kHz internal precision and 7.1-channel support of VIA's Envy24PT, but it's a solid low-end audio chip.

Of course, audio chip specifications are only so meaningful; how an audio implementation sounds can be far more important. To my ears, the SY-P4I875P's integrated CMI8738 audio sounds only average, but average is about as good as low-end integrated audio gets. Motherboards using VIA's new Envy24PT sounded better in my impromptu back-to-back listening tests with MP3 and CD audio, but the SY-P4I875P's audio quality at the high-end of the spectrum was better than the more pedestrian south bridge/ALC650 integrated audio solutions available for the Pentium 4.

Honestly, anyone really interested in audio quality is going to be far better off ditching integrated solutions completely and going for a true 24-bit audio card like M-Audio's Revolution 7.1.

RAID, RAID, and more RAID
Soyo is riding RAID all the way with the SY-P4I875P. Check out the board's assortment of storage-related ports and chips:

The SY-P4I875P is an integrated RAID lover's wet dream. It serves up more storage options than any motherboard I've ever seen.

Thanks to the ICH5R south bridge, the SY-P4I875P supports two channels of "parallel" ATA/100 and a couple of Serial ATA 150 ports without having to resort to extra chips. ICH5R-attached Serial ATA devices can also be configured in software RAID 0 and 1 arrays thanks to Intel's Application Accelerator RAID Edition driver. The key benefit of the board's ICH5R-based storage options is that they're all tied directly to the north/south bridge interconnect; other integrated storage devices have to share PCI bus bandwidth, which maxes out at 133MB/s.

Complementing the board's existing "parallel" ATA support is Highpoint's HPT372 ATA/133 RAID controller, which supports RAID 0, 1, and 0+1. For those of us who still have plenty of ribbon cables and older hard drives kicking around, the HPT372 is great addition to the board, especially since the chip supports four-drive arrays.

Rounding out the SY-P4I875P's storage options is an integrated Sil 3112 Serial ATA controller from Silicon Image. The Sil 3112 matches the ICH5R's support for two Serial ATA devices in RAID 0 or 1, which gives the board support for a couple of concurrent, two-drive Serial ATA RAID arrays. The board also supports four independent Serial ATA devices right out of the box.

Honestly, the SY-P4I875P's opulent storage options would be overkill for a mainstream desktop product, but as an enthusiast, I'm not complaining. It will be some time before we can all roll over to Serial ATA drives exclusively, which makes "parallel" ATA RAID a more essential integrated peripheral for the near future. The fact the SY-P4I875P also has two Serial ATA RAID options is particularly nice because it lets users enjoy the spoils of RAID 0 and 1 arrays at the same time. I certainly wouldn't mind striping a couple of 10K RPM Raptors in a RAID 0 array on the SY-P4I875P's ICH5R for operating system and program files drive while keeping all my precious data files protected in a mirrored RAID 1 array with a couple of massive drives on the board's Sil 3112 controller.

Extras
To make use of all the SY-P4I875P's storage options, users will need a lot of cables. Soyo delivers, sort of.

Though the SY-P4I875P's bundle includes four Serial ATA data cables, three IDE ribbons, and a floppy cable, Serial ATA power adapters are sorely missing. Power supplies with native support for Serial ATA devices are slowly making their way onto the market, but they're far from common.

Thankfully, Soyo somewhat redeems itself by including an updated version of its Sigma box with the SY-P4I875P. With an integrated memory card reader and pairs of USB and Firewire ports, the new Sigma box serves up everything but extra audio jacks. The new Sigma box also fits in 3.5 or 5.25" drive bays. Interestingly enough, the cables for the Sigma box are keyed to work with the SY-P4I875P, and may be incompatible with other motherboards.

The SY-P4I875P's also comes with software CD containing a couple of useful applications. Soyo includes copies of Norton's latest Antivirus, Ghost, and Personal Firewall software among other less useful titles, but strictly warns against using the software with non-Soyo products. Sure enough, popping the CD into a system built around a Tyan motherboard gives me an "Illegal User" error. Disabling AutoRun for data CDs let me fire up Explorer and browse the CD from on non-Soyo-based system, which probably violates at least one clause of the DMCA. Oops.