X-bit labs

Contemporary Socket A Chipsets: NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400, NVIDIA nForce2 400, SiS748 and VIA KT600 (page 7)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

Testbed and Methods

The major goal of this test session was to compare the performance of the contemporary Socket A chipsets. We decided to test our solutions not only with the CPUs supporting 400MHz bus, but also with the processors supporting 333MHz bus. Even though the major feature of our today’s testing participants is the support of processors with 400MHz bus, we can’t do without a performance check with the 333MHz bus CPUs.

For NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400 we selected ABIT NF7 2.0 mainboard. This solution demonstrates almost the fastest performance today among all mainboards based on the same NVIDIA core logic. For this reason and also because the mainboards based on the single-channel nForce2 400 are not that widely spread yet, we used the same mainboard in single-channel mode to test the single-channel NVIDIA chipset.

As far as the test platform for VIA KT600 is concerned, we used the reference mainboard from VIA. The thing is that the first revisions of the mass products, which we managed to get hold of, didn’t run as fast as the reference mainboard from VIA. That is why we are unable to evaluate the chipset performance appropriately, until the mainboard guys finalize their products completely.

The same is true for SiS748, with that only difference that there are hardly any mainboards in the mass market based on this solution at all. That is why we used the reference mainboard for SiS748 tests, too.

We also used AMD Athlon XP 3200+ processor (400MHz bus, 2200MHz actual core frequency) and Athlon XP 3000+ (333MHz bus, 2167MHz actual core frequency).

So, we had the following testbeds ready:

All tests were run in MS Windows XP Professional SP1. The memory timings were set to maximum performance (2-2-2-5). At 333MHz bus frequency the memory worked at 333MHz and 400MHz; at 400MHz bus – we only used 400MHz memory.

Performance at 333MHz Bus Frequency

Athlon XP processors with 333MHz bus frequency are the most widely spread processors today, and their counterparts with 400MHz bus are very unlikely to spread all over the place in the near future. That is why we would like to check the performance of Socket A platforms with processors supporting 333MHz bus in the first place. As we have already mentioned in this part of our test session we used Athlon XP 3000+ on Barton core working at the actual frequency of 2167MHz.

As is known, the memory controller makes the major contribution to the overall system performance. Therefore, we decided to start with the memory subsystems performance of our today’s testing participants. The table below contains the results obtained with Cachemem utility: