Singapore Hardware Zone

Intel 810 Chipset Review
Reviewed by Vijay Anand (8/6/99)

<Introduction><The i810><The GMCH><The ICH>
<The FWH><Performance><Graphics><Conclusion>

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Introduction

** All benchmakrs, results and opinions are based on the world's 1st i810 motherboard, the DFI-PW65D, which I had for testing. But generally, most i810 boards should have many similarities between them, hence this article should be valid for all i810 motherboards**

Ever wondered how come basic home and office PC's are getting so cheap, besides falling component costs? The keyword here is integration. As technology improves, it gets easier and more feasible to compact more features into a silicon and eliminating many smaller components that are spewed everywhere on the motherboard or card (if it's a video/sound card) and reducing the area of the PCB needed and many more. Just take a peek into a PC of 15 years back; Such a PC needed a separate I/O card, numerous small soldered/socketed cache chips for a tiny( in today's context ) amount of L2 cache, HDD's were as huge and thick as a dictionary + weighed as much as slim printer, video and sound cards were very long, clumsy and needed many supporting chipsets to do rudimentary functions and much more! Shift to the present day and the same items are as follows: The I/O card is gone and it's functions have been integrated on to the motherboard, motherboards basically have only 2 main silicon chips controlling everything on the board and L2 cache has now been integrated within the CPU (Celeron and K6-3), HDD's pack enormous amounts of data (so much that 15 years back, if you told a person you owned a 25GB HDD, he would think you were the richest person in the country!) in only a 3.5" form factor, Video-cards look so small and simple that it basically consists of the chipset, ram and the connectors! Some motherboards just integrate both sound and video on to the spare-space on-board.

Talking about Integration, SIS was the first chipset vendor to combine video and later on, video + audio in it's motherboard chipsets. It was very suitable for simple office and home users, who mainly run typical office applications, play 2D games and audio-CD. Try running database related applications and 3D games and you'll be disgusted with its sloppy performance. The same goes for it's sound quality, which is just adequate for office usage. Recently VIA decided to dabble in built-in video solutions and struck a deal with Trident (a long forgotten video-chip giant) to use Trident-Blade's core into it's new MVP4 chipset (basically an MVP3 core) with UDMA-66 support. But up till now, all of the integrated video solutions on the motherboard chipsets are not even the least enticing, even the MVP4. Not only the video-core isn't powerful enough but also the fact that it uses UMA to utilise part of the system ram for graphics memory and the bandwidth serving all this is very lacking for 3D. Most of the other motherboards in the market have an AGP bus to relieve the system a little and give graphics/video it's own bus but the rest of the system still uses the PCI bus as the central-bus, which is getting slow and outdated.

With the release of Celeron processors, Intel finally got the point that there is a big enough market to make cheap CPU's and Intel kept on working something for this market, e.g. the EX and ZX chipset. Intel launched the i810 chipset and the Celeron-466 on the 26th of April and is marketing the i810 specifically with Celeron-based systems in mind. The best part is that it uses a new architecture that is far more efficient than the previous generations of chipsets.

The i810 Architecture

Traditionally everything on the system communicates with the CPU and memory via the slow and maybe saturated central PCI bus but with the introduction of the i810 chipset, a new architecture is born and is called the Accelerated Bus Architecture (AHA). AHA allows direct communication of the CPU, memory, graphics (built-in to the chipset) and other peripherals. It replaces the PCI as the central bus and the typical North and South-bridge chipsets with a three-hub architecture. The three hubs (separate chips) are the Graphics and Memory Controller Hub (GMCH), the I/O Controller Hub (ICH) and the Firmware Hub (FWH). The below diagram will help to explain how the new AHA works and how each hub helps:



Between the ICH and GMCH, there is an exclusive bus with a bandwidth of 266mb/s (double that of the PCI-bus ) to make sure that there is no slow-down for any of the connected peripherals like HDD's, AC97 codecs, PCI cards and others, to communicate with the processor or system ram. Another point to note is that the i810 chipset can only support a single CPU unlike the BX chipset that can support dual-CPUs. It's not much to matter at all because i810 is for the value market or system.

The GMCH

The GMCH as the name suggests contains the graphics and memory controllers and the following is the proper break down of components:

  • System Bus Interface

  • System Memory Interface

  • Display Interface

  • Display Cache Interface ( 82810-DC100 only)

  • Digital TV-Out

  • Clock Signals

  • Miscellaneous Interface Signals

  • Hub Interface

     
    There are 2 versions of the GMCH, the 82810 GMCH and the 82810-DC100 GMCH, the main difference being that the DC100 version has the Display Cache Interface integrated which supports 4mb of external display cache. Both versions of the GMCH are pin-compatible, hence one manufacturer can have a low cost model and the premium model without the need to re-design the base model. Here's a schematic of the GMCH:



    The graphics part is handled by an integrated i752 core basically a spruced up i740. It's key features are that it has dual-rendering pipes, motion-compensation for DVD, 1600x1200 desktop resolution, 230Mhz RAMDAC, a maximum of 16-bit colour support in 3D and a Direct-AGP connection that is essentially a direct access to the system memory to store all graphics data as the GMCH itself has no local memory. And guess what? The memory bus is locked at 100mhz, while the FSB can be 66/100Mhz (the official ones but there are the usual unofficial ones by the manufacturers! ). This means even if you intend to overclock the system by changing the FSB, the memory-bus is still at 100mhz, hence any standard PC100 rams will do the job without you needing to hunt for those faster and expensive rams. But you can't use your older PC-66 rams unless they do happen to be of good quality and are happy to run at 100Mhz. Now back to the Direct-AGP connection, since the graphics controller (in the GMCH) has a direct connection to the memory, the bandwidth is 800mb/s (64-bit memory bus / 8-bits x 100mhz) and that is more than AGP 2X transfers of 533mb/s (32-bit / 8-bits x 133Mhz)!! Don't get excited yet because all the graphics adapters have their own local memory that has far higher bandwidth between the graphics chipset and the on-board memory but once the graphics data (e.g. textures) are too big for the local memory, they'll have to be stored in the system's memory if the graphics adapter uses an AGP connection. In that situation, the GMCH's integrated video becomes more favourable because of it's higher bandwidth to the system's memory but this isn't good enough as the video engine itself isn't as powerful as what Intel is marketing it as (would you believe TNT-like performance for an i752 ?! ).

    Fortunately, the costlier version of the GMCH called the i82810-DC100 can support an optional 4mb of cache for the integrated video (the cheaper i82810 GMCH can't support the extra cache). The DC100 just means that it uses 100Mhz cache. There is a possibility of a DC133 because the BIOS supports the setting of the cache speed either to 100 or 133. The odd thing is that that there is a separate bus from the GMCH to the cache but it's only 32-bits wide, meaning only a 400mb/s bandwidth!! Makes any sense? Well at least the cache is given to the integrated video to lessen the system memory's burden. Overall the idea of this and the Direct-AGP connection is far better than the old UMA-architecture in older motherboard designs. Oh and I forgot to tell you that 1mb of your system memory is reserved from the second you switch on the PC as a display frame buffer. Once in windows, it will use the Intel Dynamic Video Memory Technology (D.V.M.) technology to freely allocate itself an amount of system memory as and when it needs to. Here's a snippet from Intel:

    "The internal graphics device on both the 82810 and 82810-DC100 support Intel Dynamic Video Memory Technology (D.V.M.). With D.V.M, the allocated size of system memory used for display graphics can be dynamically altered. For example, if 2 MB of system memory is needed, the driver allocates this amount. If later, only 1.5 MB is needed, the driver allocates the 1.5-MB size freeing up the remaining 512 KB for system use.

    In addition to D.V.M., the 82810-DC100 supports Display Cache (DC). The graphics engine of the 82810-DC100 uses DC for implementing rendering buffers (e.g., Z buffers). This rendering model requires 4 MB of display cache and allows graphics rendering (performed across the graphics display cache bus) and texture MIP map access (performed across the system memory bus) simultaneously. Using D.V.M. all graphics rendering is implemented in system memory. The system memory bus is arbitrated between texture MIP-map accesses and rendering functions."

    This kind of video-integrated solution can use some Megabytes of your ram when playing 3D games on top of the game's own memory requirements, so do make sure you take this into account when buying a game. Somewhere above I mentioned that the RAMDAC is at a lowly 230Mhz but fear not because it's serves very well up to 1024x768 @ 75Hz. Anymore and you'll get a blurred output. There is a big drawback to expansion as the i810 does not support an AGP connector, so take this into consideration.

    Oh and a little bit more on the memory section before we move on to the ICH: The BX chipset is able to support up to 1GB of memory while the new i810 can only support 256mb of memory. This is the reason why you'll see up to 4 DIMM slots in the BX chipset based motherboard, which has 8 addressing lines to cater to 4 DIMM slots that can take in Single or Double-sided DIMMs mixed. The i810 has only 4 memory addressing lines, therefore, motherboards based on the i810 chipset come with 2 DIMM slots that can take in either 2 Single or Double-sided DIMMs mixed. The reason being, Double sided DIMMs need 2 addressing lines each (Single-sided DIMMs need 1 addressing line) and these are usually some of the 128mb DIMM modules or the majority of 256mb DIMM modules. Oh and by the way, since i810 is for integrated cost-effective systems that won't run like servers that use ECC memory for safety, ECC support has been removed in the i810 chipset.

    The ICH

    This hub, the Input/Output Controller Hub (ICH) is is a highly integrated multifunctional I/O Controller Hub that employs the Intel® Accelerated Hub Architecture (AHA) to make a direct connection from the graphics and memory to the integrated AC97 controller, the IDE controllers, dual USB ports, and PCI add-in cards. The following is the proper break down of components:

  • PCI Bus Interface, PCI Rev 2.2 compliant ( ICH supports 6 slots and 4 for the ICH0 )

  • Integrated IDE Controller ( ICH0 supports Ultra ATA/33; ICH supports Ultra ATA/66 )

  • USB host interface with support for 2 USB ports

  • AC'97 2.1 Compliant Link for Audio and Telephony CODECs

  • Power Management Logic ( ACPI 1.0 Compliant, ACPI Power States = S1, S3, S4, S5 )

  • Low Pin count (LPC) Interface

  • Enhanced DMA Controller, Interrupt Controller and Timer Functions

  • Real-Time Clock

  • System Management Bus (SMBus) compatible with most I2C devices

  • Supports ISA Bus via External PCI-ISA Bridge

  • Hub Interface to use AHA

  • Firmware Hub (FWH) Interface

  • Alert On LAN Support ( ICH only )


Here again, there are two versions of the ICH, the 82801AA (ICH) and 82801AB (ICH0) hubs. The main differences are that the ICH has support for up to 6-PCI slots, U-ATA/66 and Alert-On-LAN, whereas the ICH0 doesn't have the last features and only has support for 4-PCI slots and U-ATA/33. Here's a graphical view of it:

ICH diagram

Besides being Intel's 1st chipset to have integrated video, it is also AC'97 ready. AC'97 ready basically means, external audio and/or telephony codec chips(s) can be fixed on to the motherboard and the chipset refers to these codecs by means of an AC'97 Link and uses CPU power to execute the sound and/or telephony features. Codecs are like written instructions to tell the system how to utilise it, e.g, an Audio-codec tells the system how to run and output audio but all processing is done by the CPU. Now, these codecs are very cheap to include hence, an i810 board essentially can have video, audio and modem functionality, which brings about even cheaper systems based on Intel-Celeron Processors, a market VIA and SIS completely missed to cash-in. We don't have to worry about the CPU utilization as a Celeron can easily spare a few percent of brain-power to give such all-round functionality to a typical Celeron-system (low-mid range home and business users) without taking a big toll in CPU power. After all, isn't this the market where Intel is catering for with this chipset?

But providing the necessary codecs or not, is up to the motherboard manufacturer's choice depending on which audience his motherboard is targeted for. They can even forgo this software method and provide the actual sound or telephony chipsets and integrate it on to the board to produce better sound with almost no performance hit. There is yet one more choice and that is not to provide any of the functions at all and instead use an AMR card that contains the codecs and output connectors and plug into the new AMR-slot which all the i810 boards are equipped with. What is AMR? AMR stands for Audio & Modem Riser card. It does just as what it says, gives Audio and Modem functionality on the cheap. It is similar as to the manufacturer integrating the codecs on the boards except this method doesn't require the codecs to be on board at all, but it's on the AMR card itself. The manufacturer can even combine the two above methods, e.g. provide audio codec on the motherboard but if you need modem ant telephony functions, you can get the appropriate AMR card to handle the functions at a very low cost or get a dedicated PCI-card to handle those functions more effectively. It's really giving more choices for the manufacturer and the user to expand their PC-functionality with different cost, advantage and disadvantages. As of writing this there aren't any commercial AMR cards yet and I guess manufacturers are waiting for the i810 boards to get a bit more popular before going into AMR-card production.

The i810 chipset does not come with an ISA-Bridge Controller by default and is the 1st chipset to omit this but it is an option, which the manufacturer can choose to implement. But since it has now become an option and it is high time for ISA support to be discontinued, most manufacturers will forego the ISA slots.

There is now a new interface called a Low-Pin-Count (LPC) Interface that is used to connect Floppy and other port controllers that used to communicate via the old ISA-bus. Since ISA support is removed from chipset (but can be included by manufacturer at higher cost), the LPC is a 4-bit, 33Mhz bus that is actually a simplified ISA bus.

The Firmware Hub (FWH) Interface is just a small 33Mhz bus to communicate with the FWH where the Bios of both the system and integrated-video are located.

The FWH

If your searching for the big and bulky-looking Bios chip on an i810 board, it won't be there! In it's place is a tiny chip called the Firmware Hub (FWH) which may or may not be socketted (it was socketted on the DFI motherboard). It's size is similar to that of the Bios chips on the new Gigabyte-BX2000 motherboard ( I wonder why it wasn't socketted ). There are 2 versions of the FWH also! The i82802AB is a 4Mbit (512Kb) part and the i82802AC is an 8Mbit part (1Mb!). Currently most motherboards will use the 4Mbit parts, as it's more than enough for typical systems. Now what does tiny hub do? It contains the Bios for both the system and integrated-video. The system Bios has been greatly improved from the Award-Bios that we've been using for ages! Lots more fine-tuned options to choose from for us tweakers. Sorry for the lack of screen-shots in this section. Besides the Bios, it also contains the all-new, Random Number Generator (RNG, which Intel claims it is used for greater security. This is a snippet from the Data-sheets:

"Intel will provide a Windows driver to give third party software access to our RNG for use as a security feature. Also provided will be a device driver developer kit (DDK) for operating system vendors who wish to design security drivers for their platform."

Well, one thing is for sure, that RNG really works! How do I know? When I booted up the PC using the DFI i810 motherboard, during the HDD auto-detection, it will auto-detect your HDD as well as assign a unique number (I didn't take note of how many digits long it was, but it was probably 8 digits). I had 2 HDDs, so 2 very different numbers were assigned to them. When I restated the PC, the numbers change radically for both. I've since re-booted numerous times, never seeing the same pair of numbers again. Why Intel has featured this RNG in hardware is because hardware generated numbers have a far less chance to repeat themselves in a certain given period and the fact that the numbers are bigger than software generated numbers, as claimed by Intel. There are more security related features but if you need to know more and are a bit technical, read-up the Data-sheets. I guess the 8mb version can feature a higher security threshold.

Since we now know how the i810 Architecture works, here's a general pciture of how an i810 boad would look like and location of new components. It's the DFI PW65-D:

i810 motherboard

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Performance

The processor used for this test is a C-300A slot-1 which is of the SL32A batch overclockable to 450 and a C-400 PPGA which is of the SL37X with an Asus Slocket. Since I acquired the C-300A much latter, I can't show many results for it. The C-400 PPGA I had was not overclockable at all even with another MSI Slocket. I will investigate that latter. The column in concern is processor with DFI PW65-D, the Gigabyte BX2000 is a BX-chipset based board for comparison. The Riva-128 video-card was chosen because it is as close as possible to the descendant of the i752 graphics engine that I could test on, the i740 based video cards.

A special thanks to CPU-Zilla who had kindly invited me over to his place to do some of the testing which was not possible with my components. I even found how overclockable my C400 was at his place, up to 500MHz!

Test Configuration
Processor(s): Intel Celeron-400 PPGA SL37X Malay + Asus Slocket &
Intel Celeron-300A Slot-1 SL32A Malay.
Motherboards(s): DFI PW65-D
Gigabyte BX2000
RAM: 1 - 64MB LGS-7J SDRAM DIMM
Hard Drive(s): IBM Deskstar-3 3.2G
Video Card(s): Built in i752 graphics engine
Canopus Riva128-AGP
Bus Master Drivers: Windows 98 Bus Mastering Drivers
Video Drivers: 4.11.01.1161 Version PV1.0
Operation System(s): Windows 98 (build 4.10.1998)+ Direct-X 6.1
System Combination(s): DFI PW65-D + built-in i752
Gigabyte BX2000 + Riva128-AGP
ECS P6BX-A + Creative-TNT AGP

Wintune 98 Results

Area Tested C-400 (66x6)
DFI PW65-D 		C-400 (66x6)
Gigabyte BX2000
CPU Integer (MIPS) 1172.421 1168.128
CPU Floating Point (MFLOPS) 461.7393 460.6635
Video(2D) (MPixeles/s) 65.34016 84.43046
Direct3D (MPixeles/s) 51.48141 100.9557
OpenGL (MPixels/s) 37.82972 70.06438
Memory (MB/s) 666.8571 682.373
Cached Disk (MB/s) 64.7826 70.33907
Uncached Disk (MB/s) 1.785674 1.904453


Other Benchmarks

CPU speed + Motherboard C-400A
(66 x 6)
DFI PW65-D 		C-400A
(66 x 6)
Gigabyte BX2000
ZD CPU-Mark99 29.6 30.3
ZD FPU-WinMark99 2140 2130
ZD Business Winstone99 15.7 15.9
NU Sys Info (pts) 127 116.7
Sisoft CPU benchmark (MIPS) 956 956
Sisoft FPU benchmark (MFLOPS) 271 270
Sisoft memory benchmark (MB/s) 180 182

As you can see, the performance of the board is similar to the BX-chipset motherboard.

 

Graphics Quality and Performance

Here are the Quake-2 results for the DFI PW65-D i810 motherboard against a Gigabyte BX2000 + Canopus Riva128-AGP:

CPU speed + Motherboard C-400A
(66 x 6)
DFI PW65-D 		C-400A
(66 x 6)
Gigabyte BX2000 		C-400A
(66 x 6)
ECS
Quake-2 @ 640x480, Demo 1 / 2 (fps) 44.0 / 41.8 45.8 / 42.0 68.2 / 65.9
Quake-2 @ 800x600, Demo 1 / 2 (fps) 31.1 / 30.9 similar 51.0 / 51.6
Quake-2 @ 1024x768, Demo 1 / 2 (fps) 20.4 / 20.7 absolutly un-playable!! 32.0 / 31.8

The integrated i752 wasn't so great after all but let's reserve comments when video-cards based on i752 with very fast local memory crop up. As of now, you can expect performance very similar to the Riva-128. The odd thing is that the i752 still losses out to the Riva-128 by 1-fps even after its enhancements from i740 at 640x480 and 800x600 resolution. But the Direct-AGP connection shows some use at 1024x768 resolution where the Riva-128 struggles to even load the game. Let's dwell into some in-depth 3D-Mark99-MAX results:

3DMark-99-MAX Results
3DMark Results CPU Geometry Speed Rasterizer Score Game-1
3DMark Results 3DMark Results 3DMark Results 3DMark Results
That's a big change from the Q2 results! Of course the C-450 is faster, what did you expect?! Integrated i752 engine is a little faster than the Riva-128 here. The i752 engine speedier than Riva-128 even with a higher speed Celeron.
Game-2 Fill-Rate Fill-Rate with Multi-texturing 4mb Texture Rendering Speed
3DMark Results 3DMark Results 3DMark Results 3DMark Results
Same as Game-1 but a larger difference. Fast memory access and improved engine helps here. Due to the Riva-128 with C-450, it has a higher fill-rate than the i752 engine with a C-400. Now you can see the advantage of dual-rendering pipes of the i752 engine showing it's muscle. I don't know how come the Riva-128 loses out in this test eventhough it has a local memory of 4Mb SGRAM! Is the AHA showing its efficiency?
8mb Texture Rendering Speed 16mb Texture Rendering Speed Bump Mapping, 2-Pass Bump Mapping, 2-Pass
3DMark Results 3DMark Results 3DMark Results 3DMark Results
Now we are talking! The Riva-128 doesn't have enough local memory and will have to use AGP to store textures in memory. The i752 has got very fast access to textures in the system ram and is very efficient. This is the real baffling result! When the i752 has all the memory it needs to store/retrieve textures from the memory at a very fast speed, why is it slower than the less-efficient Riva-128 on AGP!!?? 32mb is just too much for these old video-cards on a PC with 64Mb memory. TNT is still going strong. Unfortunatly, the Riva-128 doesn't support this feature for comparison.

Have a look at the below selected screenshots taken by 3D-Mark99 test suite for comparisons. Click on the tiny pictures to get the full-sized version but, each one is about 300Kb in size. I recommend that you open these in a separate window so that you can continue with the review, while the image loads.

i752 Creative-TNT Reference Description

Texture Resolution
As far as we know, TNT has some of the best 3D output (reserve G200/400 for the best), and the i752's 3D output is exactly like that of a TNT or the reference image? You decide!

Game-1
Another neck-to-neck competition.

Game-2
Here, I feel that the i752's output is a tad crisper than the reference image and TNT's output.

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Drawbacks and Conclusion

The use of the new, improved and more efficient Hub-Architecture is big plus point for the whole system, but there are drawbacks to this new i810 chipset. The integrated video is sufficient for all low, many mid-end users and office PCs. The 230Mhz RAMDAC output is sufficient to show crisp though not very sharp windows display for a 17" monitor and the 3D gaming-speed is just sufficient for current games. There is no AGP slot, thereby limiting the number of choices of video-cards severely if someone using a board based on this chipset is a heavy gamer. It does not yet support 133Mhz bus speed officially and has a limit of taking up to a maximum of 256Mb of PC-100 SDRAM on 2 DIMM slots.

Very recently, there has been a problem with the i810 chipset combined with the P3 using SIMD instructions. This a snippet taken from ZDNET News:

"An erratum that affects the Pentium III's SSE or Streaming SIMD multimedia instruction set is keeping Intel's new 810 chip set from working with the chip.
The erratum, called MaskMovQ, is a Pentium III glitch. And while Intel has created a workaround for it, the 810 doesn't support it, making it incompatible with the Pentium III. Intel isn't supporting the workaround in the chip set because the 810 was not designed or validated to work with the Pentium III, said Intel spokesman Dan Fancisco."

How unfortunate that this value chipset has problem with the P3 when the price for the P3-450 is very appealing. Anurax and myself have tried the P3-450 on the DFI PW65-D motherboard running all common programs/tasks and even using PhotoShop. Anurax also tried a benchmark from Intel that identifies the CPU as P3 and runs some SSE related instructions with no problems. So I can conclude that although there is a bug, it is as minor as all the other bugs found in all of Intel CPUs.

Nevertheless, this Trio-Chipset based i810 is a good move from Intel to give more options for the PC market to manufacture cheaper and more integrated PCs using the Intel CPU. This spells more trouble for AMD, IDT, Rise and the left over Cyrix. But remember, competition brings out the best of each other and more price-cuts for us end-users!! The i810 has just taken a step towards a new direction an Intel would like to try it out 1st before bringing on more beefy chipsets. The i820 is the chipset to really look out for as it supports an AGP slot and the new 133Mhz FSB with support for RDRAM, but this is due in September and RDRAM support may be delayed. Sigh! For now, let's enjoy this restless and ever-changing PC market =)

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