In the PC industry, some technologies have been with us for a long time. The PCI bus is one of those. While not quite as venerable, the AGP bus and DDR memory have also been around for quite some time. While only the PCI bus has really started to show its age, Intel has decided that it's time to replace all three of these technologies. Not only has Intel decided to replace these technologies, but they've replaced them all at once. The PCI and AGP buses are being replaced by the new PCI Express bus, and DDR is being supplanted by DDR2.

While we're always excited about new toys, those of you who have been around for a few of these new waves of goodies are aware of the fact that the first wave of products to implement a new technology don't necessarily offer much over the existing hardware that they're intended to replace. At the same time, early adopters are often faced with a short list of "gotchas" - little issues or quirks that are your reward for jumping on the bandwagon ahead of the general public.

There have already been reviews out there where Intel's new offerings have been benchmarked until they begged for mercy. We're not here to duplicate that effort. Instead I've decided to answer the question that I had when this new gear landed on my doorstep: is it time for me to upgrade? Like many of you, I've now got bills to pay and so I'm not able to stay on the bleeding edge of PC hardware as I was somehow able to do when I was a student (I'm still not sure how that worked, exactly). In fact my computer desk is currently "graced" with a rather pedestrian 2.4 GHz P4B (*gasp* no hyperthreading!) system with a not-so-high-end-but-still-respectable Radeon 9500 Pro.

So what we're going to do is to take a look at what the new 915 and 925 bring to the table over Intel's previous generation of hardware in terms of features, gotchas, quirks, and performance. We'll probably spend as much time talking about things like power requirements, heat, noise, heatsink retention brackets and so forth as we will about FPS, because frankly I feel that such things are every bit as important.

So let's start by looking at what makes the 915 and 925 different from their predecessors...

To begin, let's take a look at how the 915 and 925 chipsets differ from previous Pentium 4 chipsets. In addition to taking a look at the previous generation P4 platform - the 875, we'll also look at the 845 platform that one of our benchmark systems is running. Let's start with the 845:

Ah, the venerable old 845 platform. This should bring back some fond memories for you Intel fans. The 845 was the first platform that brought DDR and the P4 together and allowed geeks everywhere to enjoy a Pentium 4, without the previously-required side of Rambus (that Rambus stuff goes straight to your hips, you know).

Crikey! I'd actually forgotten that you could pair a P4 with PC133 SDRAM back then. Oh, the humanity. Note the 3.2 GB/sec of bandwidth to the CPU. While this is the official bandwidth with a 400 MHz front-side bus, a lot of people (including myself) ran these systems with a 533 MHz front-side bus, increasing the CPU to MCH link to 4.2 GB/sec.

Let's move forward with the more recent Intel desktop chipsets.