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Date Posted: July 8, 2002

SiSoftware Sandra

Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the CPU, MMX and memory speeds of all the platforms.

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

The scores between the two Northwood "A" platforms are close, as I expected them to be. However, the Northwood "B" shows a significant jump from 400FSB to 533FSB, at the same clockspeed. Dropping the Northwood "B" into the 845-A, and overclocking it to 133, it comes close to the 845E, but after 5 consecutive benchmarks, with a reboot in between, it still couldn't catch up to the "E". I guess the elves at Intel did some tweaking.

CPU Multimedia Benchmark

Although the scores were close, we see the added bandwidth from the FSB jump has paid dividends for the 845E. Even the overclocked MSI 845-A wasn't close, and lagged behind quite a bit. The Dell Dimension did alright, being a little faster than the 845D chipset.

CPU Memory Benchmark

As expected, the RDRAM based 850 clobbers the DDR boards by a wide margin. This shouldn't be too surprising for those of you who follow the memory trends. Despite supporting the same DDR speeds (PC2100), the Max2-BLR and the overclocked 845-A pull ahead of the stock speed 845-A. Nothing noticable though, and we can see that PC2700 support is sorely needed here.

PC Mark 2002

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As with the SiSoft scores, our PC Mark scores follow a similar trend. The 533FSB really does make a difference for CPU horsepower. The RDRAM system does pull ahead in the memory benchmarks, but as we've seen before, the 533FSB does pretty much nothing to pull the memory scores any higher.

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