850E chipsets and P4 with 533 MHz FSB

Does the P4’s with the 533 MHz FSB require a 850E chipset to be taken full advantage of? Or would the slightly older 845 chipsets do just as well? Is that extra system bus size on the 850 just for overclocking or is it used for other things as well?

I am running a P4 - 2.4 with the 845G chipset. The data thoughputs on benchmark are consistent with getting the highest clockrates to memory, AGP, and PCI.

I have a Gig of DDR and a GeForce 4 Ti in it. The thing smokes. Motherboard made by Intel, Video card by Asus. Video is significantly overclocked. So far it has been perfectly stable running XP Pro.

Hope that helps.

So then does the 850 chipset offer any advantage over the 845?

(On a side note question, do any of the intel chipsets support AGP 8X?)

The i850E has the potential to be faster than the 845G. The fastest memory for a 850E is RDRAM PC1066. The 845G does up to DDR333. DDR 333 is on par with RDRAM PC800, so if you run PC1066 with the 850E (and all other parts the same, i.e CPU, graphics, HD, etc) you should end up with a slightly faster machine.

However, although the 845G officially only supports DDR333, several motherboard manufacturers let you overclock the mem, and I think some let you go all the way up to DDR400. DDR400 should compare to PC1066, but I don’t think it’s quite as fast.

/Markus