Intel 845 Chipset Review & Motherboard Roundup: September 2001

The Performance Test

We limited the number of tests run simply because the motherboards were so mature that they already performed very close to each other.  For performance information on the i845 chipset itself, take a look at our P4X266 Review.

Even in spite of the fact that we ran the Chaintech board in PC100 mode (it wouldn't work with three DIMMs in PC133 mode), the performance difference between it and the performance leading QDI board was only 4.7%. 

The same unfortunately cannot be said for Quake III Arena which gives us an idea of how a more memory bandwidth intensive application responds to moving down to PC100 SDRAM.  If you throw out the Chaintech score, the performance span ranges only over 4.7%.  The poor performance of the Chaintech solution is the perfect example of why the 845 shouldn't be used with anything but PC133 SDRAM.