Well...I pretty much know what these things are but, still keep reading and learning, some of the websites use the terms interchangeably. I am kind of confused. When they mention Pentium chip and an AMD chip, do they mean the chip on the chipset or the CPU on the socket? Besides, for not so up-to-date motherboard, as you guys are so familiar with, that there are two chips, northbridge and southbridge, but both are given different names, so how do we determine the name of the chipset? the example shows: Intel 845PE chipset with 845PE north bridge chip (top) and the 82801DB south bridge chip. Does it mean that the name of the northbridge chip is the name of the whole chipset?
Sometimes northbridge and southbridge are one chip. Sometimes they are two chips, or even 3 or more chips in certain specialized cases. Often the one southbridge will be compatable with various northbridges and vice-versa. Generaly, the only official names given to combinations are the ones created by the chip maker. Different stores will list non-named sets in various ways, but they will generaly list the name of both chips. Intel makes chipsets for Intel CPUs, AMD for AMD CPUs, nvidia and VIA make chipsets for both, but VIA is mostly only making intel chips these days. Nvidia and via chipsets are generaly not as good as Intel and AMD chipsets...but there have been exceptions to this rule. Northbridges are almost always locked to a specific socket or at least to an architecture (You will not see Intel northbridges with AMD sockets or vice-versa...at least not since Socket 7). If you see the word "pentium" on something, it is a processor. If you see "Intel" or "AMD" it could be many different things. Hope this answered all your questions.
