Recently Intel recognised it needed a stop-gap chipset with dual-DDR before the release of the Springdale and Canterwood (865 and 875 respectively). Enter the Granite Bay, now named the e7205. It has a wider set of capabilities than the 845 chipsets, and supports dual-channel DDR memory and AGP 8x, although it doesn't support an 800MHz FSB. It also offers USB 2.0, ATA100 and Dolby 5.1 integrated sound.
One reason Intel has traditionally pushed RDRAM over DDR is that dual-channel RDRAM was the only memory technology that could match the high frontside bus of the Pentium 4. Now with dual-channel DDR, the e7205 takes full advantage of the 533MHz FSB (frontside bus) used by Northwood-B Pentium 4 CPUs, even when using DDR266 RAM.
The e7205 Northbridge comes with the Memory Controller Hub (MCH), and the Southbridge the 82801DB I/O Controller Hub (ICH4), which supports ATA100 but not SATA.
It's also worth noting that it's not worth using memory faster than DDR266, such as DDR400 and DDR333.The e7205 relies on a synchronous memory bus – using inexpensive DDR266 memory, the memory controller becomes capable of supplying 4.3GB/s of bandwidth, matching that of the Pentium 4's 533MHz CPU bus.
This article appeared in the July, 2003 issue of PC Authority.