X-bit labs

Fastest Pentium 4 Platform: Performance of i925, i915, i875 and i865 with DDR2-533, DDR2-400, DDR533 and DDR400 SDRAM (page 7)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

Performance in Games

It is not only in synthetic tests that the last-generation chipsets can take the main prize in. Once again we see the team of the i865PE and DDR533 SDRAM on top in the popular gaming benchmark 3DMark2001 SE. The memory subsystem in this combination evidently has a low latency and a high bandwidth.

I should remind you, however, that such a work mode is not normal for this chipset and not all i865-based mainboards allow clocking memory at 533MHz with the FSB frequency remaining at 200MHz. As for the i865PE’s normal operational mode with dual-channel DDR400, it is a bit slower in this case than the i925X with DDR2-533 SDRAM, and is practically similar to the i915P that works with DDR400 SDRAM.

The i865PE looks less attractive in the newer version of 3DMark. According to this test, DDR2 SDRAM is always faster than simple DDR. The i925X with DDR2-533 are the winning duo, followed by the i915P with the same memory. Probably, 3DMark03 enjoys the new PCI Express x16 graphics interface that has a much higher bandwidth than AGP 8x.

The results of the CPU test are somewhere between the results we got in the two versions of 3DMark. Curiously enough, the i865PE and the i915P are far behind the rest of the participants when working with DDR400 SDRAM.

The results in Quake 3 are similar to those of 3DMark2001 SE. The last-generation i865PE chipset wins once again, but we see that Quake 3 needs low memory latency first of all, so the system with DDR400 SDRAM turns to be faster than itself with DDR533 SDRAM. By the way, the i915P works with the same DDR memory much worse.

Unreal Tournament 2003 draws a similar picture of comparative performance. Note, though, that the i915P works somewhat faster with DDR400 SDRAM and even leaves the i925X with DDR2-533 behind.

Newer game engines are more critical to the memory subsystem bandwidth. Aquamark 3 gives out quite surprising results: the winning combination in many tests, the i865PE with DDR533 SDRAM, is at the very bottom of the results table, while the same chipset with DDR400 SDRAM only outperforms the i915P with the same memory subsystem. According to Aquamark 3, the winner is a system with the i925X chipset, DDR2-533 SDRAM and a graphics card with the PCI Express x16 interface.

Everything returns to the norm if we exclude the graphics subsystem. The low results of the i865PE in the previous test are most likely due to the low bandwidth of the AGP 8x bus compared to PCI Express x16.