Originally posted by worthless
Not sure where you read that at, as I've read every granite bay review I've come across so far, and the Granite bay seems to hold it's own.
The P4PE will NOT be faster than granite bay. Even with the P4PE at DDR333, Granite bay still pulls ahead. Granite Bay boards use a dual channel memory config, which performs close to 1066 RDRAM boards at stock... but the real benefit will come when overclocking.
It isn't "stuck" at 266mhz memory, it just uses a 1:1 divider, so your memory will only increase as your front side bus increases. This is by design, not limitation, as the dual channel memory theoretically provides exactly enough bandwidth as the p4 can consume. Anything more would be overkill and could hurt performance due to latency issues. As you overclock your FSB, your p4 will be able to use more bandwidth, and the memory speed will also raise, thus offering the extra bandwidth your processor needs.
At stock speeds, Granite Bay doesn't offer a significant improvement over a good i845PE board with DDR 333 memory, and performs right around the same as RDRAM 1066, so if you already had a board running DDR 333 or RDRAM 1066, the performance increase probably wouldn't be enough to warrant an upgrade... But if you will be overclocking, the granite bay will give you NICE results.
As for the original poster, you mentioned you want to overclock, so you will be buying all new memory, correct? If you already had an i845 or only had 1 dimm and weren't planning on buying more, I'd say skip granite bay, as the price of the total upgrade (ram, mobo, etc) wouldn't justify the performance increase. But since you are coming from an AMD rig and planning on buying new RAM anyway, then I see no reason not to spend an extra $20 or $30 and get a Granite Bay board, as long as it has all the features you need. The Gigabyte board, with it's load of features, is expecting to debut at around $175... this really isn't all that expensive considering a similarly configured i845pe board, like the abit It7-Max2 v2 currently retails for around $170.
If you can wait that long, and have the extra money to spend on a mobo, I'd save give it another week or two. If there are still no signs of Granite bay by then, you might wanna go ahead with an i845pe board to insure you have something before Christmas. If you can't wait that long... well, the i845PE really isn't that bad of a choice either.