Before the release of i815, Intel had come under fire for its choice to support Direct RDRAM and to drop support, at first altogether, for standard SDRAM. When Intel’s motherboards that did support SDRAM (via the MTH, Memory Translator Hub) were found to be faulty using the i820, VIA Technology stepped in and stole the 133MHz SDRAM chipset market from Intel with the Apollo Pro 133A chipset. It featured AGP4x and PC133 SDRAM, a standard that VIA helped create. Later, Intel introduced a successor to its low-cost chipset, the i810, which integrated an i752 Graphics card into the main chip of the chipset, called the Memory and Graphics Controller Hub. This chip replaced the aging North/South Bridge style of chipsets.
This new successor chipset was called the i815e, or “Silano”. It was set to replace the BX chipset on the market, and came complete with full 133 MHz SDRAM support and ATA/100 support in order to make sure that happened.
Graphics
Because the i815e was a descendent of the i810, it had graphics built into the chipset. Unlike the i810, though, the i815e features an AGP slot which will override the onboard graphics controller when a card is plugged into the slot. This means that the owner of an i815e based board didn’t have to settle with the i752 graphics card as was the case with i810. Unfortunately, he still had to pay for it when buying the board. The AGP slot also supported an AIMM (AGP Inline Memory Module) card that would add a certain amount of memory for use with the i752 graphics card for Z-Buffer Memory. Most users of the i815 chose to use their own graphics cards, though, since the performance of the 815’s graphics circuitry wasn’t all that great.
Memory
The good news is that the i815 natively supports SDRAM, meaning that there is no faulty MTH to deal with. There are, though, a few quirks with memory support. It only works with a maximum of 512MB of SDRAM. Although this might not be a problem with 99% of users, it shows that Intel defiantly didn’t want this board marketed for the higher end users. Another quirk is that it worked with the PC133 specification of Intel, which is much more strict with tolerances in trace length and quality than the VIA standard which most manufactures have been following. Fortunately, Intel’s PC133 Specification is basically just a high quality version of VIA’s, so if you buy high quality SDRAM, it will more than likely work with your i815e chipset. One nice feature of the i815, too, was that it would support the asynchronous front side bus, meaning you could run this fast PC133 memory even on a Celeron, with its 66Mhz bus.
The i815e chipset features the ICH2 chip, which acts like the Southbridge of a normal chipset. Technically, it’s named the I/O Controller Hub, Version 2. It supports ATA/100, and 2 USB roots, for a total of 4 USB ports. It also supports Intel’s CNR slot, integrated 10/100TX network controller, and modem codecs.
This chipset was loaded to the gills with new fangled tech stuff that was considered quite cool for the time.
