| The GMCH is available in two flavors, the 810 GMCH and the 810-DC100 GMCH. The i82810 is the GMCH we've been discussing thus far, the addition of the DC100 to the 810 indicates the presence of what Intel calls the "Display Cache" which operates at 100MHz, hence the name DC100. The 100MHz display cache is nothing more than 4MB of local memory, located on the motherboard, that is connected to the GMCH by a 32-bit wide dedicated bus and can be used for the z-buffer. This obviously isn't the fastest solution, however it does improve performance on systems with less system memory for the GMCH to make use of for both its frame buffer and z-buffer. There are some early indications that an 810-DC133 may follow, as many 810 motherboards come with the option of clocking the display cache at either 100MHz or 133MHz. |
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Common to both the 810 and 810-DC100 is an integrated 230MHz RAMDAC that supports 2D resolutions up to 1600 x 1200 x 8bpp @ 85Hz. If you look at those specs, the 810 once again doesn't appear to be geared towards high-end users, which it's not, however it should be just fine for the entry level user. The 230MHz RAMDAC won't allow for crisp 2D display at higher resolutions, however it will be more than sufficient for the 800 x 600 or 1024 x 768 resolutions low cost systems will probably be required to run at due to monitor restraints. The quality of the 2D output will vary from motherboard to motherboard, however overall, the quality should be decent for the overall cost of the system.
The Memory Controller
The memory portion of the GMCH is an extremely limiting factor of a potentially high-end solution, it looks like Intel will truly make the market wait for the 820 before the features of the 810 can be enjoyed by everyone. The i810 GMCH supports 8MB to 512MB of SDRAM via 2 double-sided banks (4 rows), so you probably won't see more than 2 DIMM slots on 810 motherboards. The memory bus is locked at a 100MHz frequency, in spite of the fact that the system bus is adjustable between 66 and 100MHz as well as a number of unsupported overclocked frequencies. This has a positive and a negative side to it, the positive is that regardless of your system's FSB setting, the memory will still run at 100MHz, eliminating the need for more expensive SDRAM that will run properly at overclocked speeds. The negative is that PC100 SDRAM is a requirement, so chances are that you won't be able to re-use generic PC66 SDRAM, although some PC66 SDRAM is capable of working at 100MHz just fine.
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xrror - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
It's amusing in retrospect how difficult it was for Intel to obsolete the older BX chipset. One thing people forget is the venerable 440BX was actually the hi-end server chipset - it wasn't intended to be the bread and butter Slot 1 mainstream chipset. But all the mobo makers migrated to BX since the "mainstream" LX, MX, ZX chipsets were just gimped too much.But if you ever wondered why BX had things like support for 1GB (!) of RAM, dual-processor, ACPI, etc that we take for granted now - that's why. It was supposed to be a server chipset ;p