Last week we brought you the first evaluation of the two Giga-processors from AMD and Intel, using a wide selection of platforms, but unfortunately Intel's latest flagship chipset, the i840, had to be left out. The latest official BIOS of Intel's i840-motherboard 'OR840' wouldn't let any processor run faster than 800 MHz, which to my understanding must be another proof for Intel's paranoia. Obviously Intel wanted to make sure that nobody is able to run processors in the OR840, that could be overclocked to a higher frequency than Intel's fastest processor at the date of the BIOS release. It seems as if the group of BIOS engineers for the OR840 has still not heard of the Giga-Hertz Pentium III, which is why this new processor isn't supported yet. It could also be however, that this group of BIOS engineers is well aware of the non-existent supply of Giga-Pentium IIIs, which is why they can't be bothered to enable OR840 for this processor.
I published this information along with Intel's peculiar statement, saying that systems with Giga-Pentium III are not supposed to ship with Intel's fastest official platform and finally Intel's helpful and knowledgeable German PR-team was able to supply me with an OR840 BIOS that has no 'high speed lock'. Thus I was finally able to run Giga-Pentium III on an i840-platform as well.
Intel 840 or 'Carmel'
If you should not be too familiar with i840, I suggest you to read my article about this RDRAM-chipset by the name of 'Intel's 840 chipset - The RDRAM Avenger'. However, I will try and summarize the important facts of i840 right here:
Code name 'Carmel', bigger and stronger brother of 'Camino' or i820
Official workstation and entry-server chipset
Designed for RDRAM (Rambus) support
Two Rambus channels, resulting in double the memory bandwidth and half the latency (through interleaving) of i820
Bandwidth 3.2 GB/s with PC800 RDRAM, 2 GB/s with PC600 RDRAM, no support of PC700 RDRAM
Support of PC100 SDRAM with additional MTH-chip, i840 can support up to 4 MTHs vs. only 2 MTHs supported by i820
Recently published bug with ECC SDRAM, leading the majority of Taiwanese motherboard makers to drop plans to build i840-motherboards
AGP4x - support
ATA66 - support
You can see that i840 is a lot more powerful than i820, but it requires at least two instead of only one RDRAM-modules, to populate each Rambus-channel. Intel's OR840-motherboard is a dual processor motherboard with integrated LAN and I guess you can imagine that it does not sport any overclocking features whatsoever.
ECC SDRAM Bug Turns Out to be i840's Killer
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