X-bit labs

Fastest Pentium 4 Platform: Performance of i925, i915, i875 and i865 with DDR2-533, DDR2-400, DDR533 and DDR400 SDRAM (page 5)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 08/04/2004 | 12:38 PM ]

Performance

Overall Performance Rating

There are surprises in the first test from my program already. Futuremark’s PCMark04 says that the last-generation i865PE chipset works faster than the new i925/i915, irrespective of the memory type you use with them. The advantage of the i865PE is rather solid and you cannot explain it by the use of DDR SDRAM with its lower latencies since the i915 found itself on the bottom of the table working with DDR400!

This is the same benchmark, but with a set of tests that are very slightly affected by the speed of the memory or any other system component. The new and expensive i925X with DDR2-533 memory finds itself on the very top, followed by the i915P with the same memory. Note also that the i915P has a nice score with DDR400 SDRAM. The older i865PE chipset doesn’t impress here: it is at the bottom of the table irrespective of the memory frequency.

Business Winstone 2004 puts the new chipsets on top, too. This time the result is easy to explain: the SerialATA-150 controller in the ICH6 South Bridge that the new Intel chipsets come with boasts a higher performance than the ICH5. This is enough for the new chipsets to score good results, notwithstanding the high-latency memory used with them.

Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 is most sensitive to the memory subsystem bandwidth. That’s why we see the new chipsets from the i925/i915 series getting to the top positions in the diagram. As for the i865PE, even DDR533 SDRAM cannot help it here: this chipset doesn’t communicate with this memory in the best way possible, and it also works less efficiently with the disk subsystem