Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Intel announces 4 Series desktop chipset family

ntel has four new desktop chipsets to show off from this year's Computex trade show in Taiwan. The G45 and the G43 focus on HD video playback by way of a new Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X4500HD integrated graphics chip. The P45 brings support for faster memory and is the first mainstream Intel-made chipset with two graphics card slots. A scaled-down P43 chipset rounds out the new 4 Series. All of the chipsets use Intel's familiar LGA 775 processor interface, which means support for Intel's Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad desktop CPUs. Intel has also added a 1,333MHz front side bus to each chipset, as well as support for DDR3 RAM, as well as DDR2 or DDR3 RAM at speeds up to 1,333MHz.

The new integrated graphics chip in the G45 and G43 is probably the most significant part of this announcement. First, according to Intel's claims, the GMA X4500HD chip gives the G45 and the G43 chipsets the ability to play HD video without requiring a discrete graphics card. The new chipsets include support for HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs, making them ready out-of-the-box to connect to HDTV and new PC monitors. AMD already has an HD-capable chipset in its AMD 780G circuitry, but that chipset has not achieved broad mainstream adoption.

And as usual when Intel announces a new integrated 3D chip, it also points to increased 3D game performance. In particular, Intel boasts that the X4500HD chip

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