X-bit labs

Contemporary Socket A Chipsets: NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400, NVIDIA nForce2 400, SiS748 and VIA KT600 (page 13)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

Performance at 400MHz Bus Frequency

The second part of our test session will be as exciting as the first one, of course. Here we used AMD Athlon XP 3200+ on Barton core working at the actual 2200MHz frequency and intended for 400MHz bus. Since the fastest AMD processors are intended for this particular bus, this test session will show if the new chipsets are really ready for work with the top AMD CPUs.

Note that here we have a little fewer results than in the previous section, because with 200MHz FSB we didn’t run any tests for platforms with DDR333 SDRAM (slower memory could be the limiting factor here, and not the chipset).

Just like in the previous part of the article we would like to begin the platforms performance analysis with the results of the synthetic Cachemem test:

The shift to faster system bus doesn’t affect the situation. Moreover, the advantages of the nForce2 chipset family become even more evident.

And SiSoft Sandra 2003 shows that VIA KT600 finally manages to defeat the single-channel nForce2 400. I wonder if we will see something like that in real applications...

PCMark2002 returns KT600 to the solid ground. NVIDIA nForce2 400 is very far ahead here. Now let’s turn to real tasks.

3DMark tests showed very common results. First comes the dual-channel NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400, and among the single-channel solutions the laurels belong to another NVIDIA offspring. The slowest one here appeared SiS748.