Canterwood is the code name for the i875P chipset from Intel.

Springdale is the code name for the i865 chipset from Intel.


Canterwood is Intel's top of the line chip. Springdale is a cut down version of the i875P. It has less features and has lower performance than the i875P. I would recommend buying an i875P(Canterwood) based board if you don't mind on spending a bit more. If you don't want to overclock then the Intel D875PBZ is an awesome board based on the i875P/ICH5R chipset. Probably the fastest and most stable stock board there is.

I do recommend using the Intel Retail Boxed heatsink. It is an efficient and quiet cooler. Intel processors run cooler than AMD anyway. However, I do not recommend using the thermal paste that Intel provides. Instead, I would use Arctic Silver 3 for better cooling performance.

Also:

The ICH5R is the absolute best southbridge available in the world. I don't care what anyone says, but integrated SATA-150 and Intel SATA RAID-0 owns everything from everyone else. It is the absolute highest performing SATA solution there is.

You are making a good decision switching to Intel, as Intel pretty much owns anything AMD has right now. They have also made the most stable mobo chipsets/drivers since the beginning. No question about it.

they make the most stable chipset hey??

Achem can you say GraniteBay

P4 2800 (800 mhz)
Abit IC7 canterwood
512mb corsair DDR 400
Sapphire ATI Radeon 9500 modded to 9700 (350 290)
maxtor Diamond 9 120gig HD (8mb)
maxtor Diamond plus 80 gig HD
Pioneer slot DVD
Lite on CDWR
3 com 3c905txm NIC
550W PSU
Sony G200 Monitor
Win XP sp1

Shame w2s went down for the last week or i would probably have got the motherboard you suggested, but after reading a lot of reviews I ended up with an IC7.

I am however having a few problems, on my clean install of win xp sp1, fully updated with the latest drivers for my hardware. Kazaa lite will work for about 5 minutes and then will stop responding, happens every time ive tried.

Cyberlink DVD player crashes everytime I try to enable dolby 2 and corrupts the screen if i enable playback acceleration nb. corruption was fixed when I installed the codec from the kazaa codec pack.

AMD is cheap, fast, but not renowned to be stable.

Intel becomes faster each day, is expensive, but stable.

My 2Cents. 8)

With good Boards/equipment there are no stability issues with AMD
With bad/low quality boards/equipment even Intel becomes unstable

Instability is often caused by low quality/underpowered PSU or low quality RAM or insufficient cooling

P.S. : Intel 3GHz comsumes more power than AMD's fastest CPU !!

Choice of CPU and motherboard depends on what's plannd to do with
With games or for OC a AthlonXP Barton (2500/2800/3000/3200) are better than Intel - for Video/Audio streaming Intel should be better due to heavy SSE2/HT optimizations in this kind of Software

I have to say this myth about Intel being more stable than AMD is utter crap!

You get what you pay for. Spend £40 on a motherboard, and you get a £40 motherboard. All I can say is that there is a reason why £140 motherboards are £140!!!

And actually, the Intel CPU is the hottest CPU ever!!! The only reason this is not reflected in most systems, is because Intel use an integrated heat spreader, while for some reason (cost) AMD do not.

ah but the athlon 64 is bringing back the heatspreader like the old K6/2/III's.

Well sweet.

For the example of the 875P chipset. Intel released chipset drivers on 4/7/03. This is going on three months without needing a fix. That right there shows it's quality. When I had a VIA chipset I had to get new drivers every other week.

But what is with the low IDE/UDMA Data transfer rates as the IAA is missing for i865/875 boards since these 3 months ??