X-bit labs

Contemporary Socket A Chipsets: NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400, NVIDIA nForce2 400, SiS748 and VIA KT600 (page 10)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 07/08/2003 | 01:26 PM ]

As we can see, SiS748 and VIA KT600 are almost equally fast. Although VIA KT600 is a more frequent winner than SiS’ solution, the performance difference between them is really tiny.

The results show that VIA and SiS optimized their chipsets for asynchronous work with 333MHz bus. That is why the use of DDR400 SDRAM with them allows achieving higher results in most cases. It is especially true for KT600. As for SiS748, it sometimes works faster with DDR333 SDRAM than with DDR400 SDRAM. With NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400 and nForce2 400 you’d better give up the asynchronous mode: the chipsets perform much faster if the FSB and memory frequencies are the same.

When we tested the data compression speed, NVIDIA chipsets working synchronously again outpaced VIA KT600 and SiS&48 quite tangibly. Could you imagine that by choosing the proper chipset you could win about 10% of extra performance in a real application!

The similar situation is also observed when we encode video into MPEG-4 format. By the way, we would like to point out that SiS chipset works faster in this application than VIA KT600.