Ran across this article at The Inquirer and I thought it might interest you guys, so here it goes...
Despite others claiming that the up and coming i845G isn"t up and running and performing, we know from a visit to the DFI booth at CeBIT the other week that"s just not true.
DFI showed an i845G board running Return to Castle Wolfenstein behind closed doors at its CeBIT booth.
The i845G version of Intel"s Breakdale chipset implies strong graphic support from a Pentium 4 side that is likely to be very attractive to many.
Intel has learned that it is important to have an AGP slot as well as integrated graphics so that end users don"t feel they are at the end of a cul-de-sac.
The board we saw was a reference sample, but ran a retail RTCW game without any problems. DFI said that the performance would be equivalent to the Geforce 2 MX400, which almost gives it Nforce performance.
Of course, there"s no Nforce for the Intel platform – for some reason Chipzilla doesn"t want to license P4 technology to Nvidia.
We think MX 200 to MX 400 performance can be expected, and the only thing that I minded about the presentation was that the picture was a bit blurry, a bit like we used to see on i810 boards with OpenGL support. But it"s a reference board, so maybe this can be fixed.
System builders and OEMs are likely to go for the i845 and the i845GL (for Celerons) big time, we think.