Intel 820 Motherboard

This
motherboard from Intel is based on the new 820 chipset (see page 139 in this
issue). It’s laid out on an ATX form factor and has onboard color-coded
ports. 820-based motherboards ship in two versions–with RDRAM and SDRAM
respectively. We tested the latter and found its performance similar to the
existing motherboards based on 440xx series of chipsets. RDRAM is supposed
to provide significantly better performance, but is more expensive.

RDRAM

Rambus
Dynamic Random Access Memory, or RDRAM, is a faster kind of RAM, which can
operate on system clock speeds of 133 MHz. It can provide double the
bandwidth of conventional PC100 SDRAM. However, RDRAM is difficult to find
at present and is very expensive.

The board supports FSB of 100
MHz and 133 MHz, depending on your processor. Even if you operate at 133 MHz
FSB, you can use the PC100 RAM, thanks to the CC820’s MTH (Memory
Translator Hub). You can have a maximum of 512 MB of SDRAM. It supports PII
350-450 MHz and PIII 450-733 MHz processors.

The motherboard has a 4x AGP
slot, which means that you can get transfer speeds of up to 1 GB/sec or
more. You’ll, however, need a graphics accelerator card that also supports
AGP 4x. These are currently hard to find, at least in the Indian market, and
are also expensive.

There are five PCI slots,
which are enough for expansion. The CC820 has one parallel and two serial
ports. The mouse and keyboard can be connected through the PS/2 ports. It
also has two USB ports. It supports the new ATA/66 interface, which allows
burst transfer rates of up to 66 MB/sec. It also comes with an ATA/66 cable,
which is one of the basic requirements for ATA/66 to work.

The motherboard is available
in two different flavors, with or without onboard audio. The onboard audio
is a Sound Blaster 128 from Creative and increases the motherboard’s cost
by Rs 650. The board also has an AMR slot, which can be used to house
next-generation modems and sound cards.

We put the CC820 through
various tests to check its performance on productivity applications,
graphics, and gaming. We compared its performance against the Asus P2-99B
(see PC Quest February 2000, page 111). In productivity applications,
the motherboard was just behind the Asus with a performance difference of
1.4 percent. In graphics and gaming using DirectX 7, the motherboard was
again behind the Asus by 2 percent, which is not much.

We then ran a gaming
benchmark from Intel that uses three 3D games, namely Iron Strategy,
Battlezone II, and Dispatched. This benchmark calculates the frame rates in
each. The motherboard failed to perform as well as the Asus. In Battlezone
and Iron Strategy, it scored 18 and 21 percent lower than the Asus
respectively. In Dispatched, it lagged behind by just nine points. In Quake
II with OpenGL, however, the CC820 managed to salvage some pride by coming
out on top with a difference of 8 percent.

On the price front, the
motherboard is slightly more expensive than the Asus. It comes with a CD
containing drivers for Sound Blaster audio PCI128, plus Adobe Acrobat Reader
4, Norton AntiVirus 5.01.02, Intel LANDesk Client Manager 6, IE 4.72, and
Encryption Plus Secure Export 3.1.