X-bit labs

Contemporary Socket A Chipsets: NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400, NVIDIA nForce2 400, SiS748 and VIA KT600 (page 8)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

Well, the results give some food for thought. We would like to draw your attention to a few most interesting things. First, note that the new SiS748 and VIA KT600 chipsets work with DDR400 SDRAM faster than with DDR333 SDRAM. Before, it didn’t make much sense to use Socket A chipsets in asynchronous mode when the bus frequency equaled 333Mhz. Now the situation has changed. The use of DDR400 instead of DDR333 boosts the performance quite noticeably. Although this is not valid for nForce2 chipset family, as they are much faster in synchronous mode, anyway.

Second, we would like to stress that the use of dual-channel memory access in nForce2 Ultra 400 doesn’t have a very big influence on the performance. In fact, we didn’t expect anything different: it is the processor bus and not the memory bus that limits the data transfer rate between the CPU and the memory of contemporary Socket A systems. We also didn’t notice any latencies lowering, which the dual-channel configurations should provide due to alternating requests of the two memory controllers. However, we shouldn’t forget that Cachemem is a synthetic benchmark, and the situation in real applications may be somewhat different.

As for the actual comparison of the results, we would like to say that both nForce2 chipsets are far ahead. It is especially noticeable if you look at the latency: nForce2 (with DDR333 SDRAM) is beyond any competition here. Well, the obtained results indicate very clearly that nForce2 9even a single-channel one) doesn’t have any causes for concern: no dangerous competitors in the market yet.

Now let’s have a look at the results obtained in another memory bandwidth test – SiSoft Sandra 2003 using Stream algorithm.

An absolute leader here is the same nForce2 Ultra 400 with DDR333 SDRAM. The results of this chipset with DDR400 are considerably lower: in this case it even falls behind VIA KT600 and SiS748. As for the single-channel chipsets, NVIDIA nForce2 400 manages to defeat the competitors. Everything indicates that DASP technology implemented in this chipset is an extremely effective way to speed up the memory subsystem. FastStream64 technology from VIA can’t prove any comparable performance improvement, as we see.

The results of the synthetic PCMark2002 also prove our preliminary conclusions. However, let’s now pass over to the platforms performance in real applications.

The popular 3D test, 3DMark2001 SE, reveals the victory of NVIDIA solutions over the rivals. The leader outperforms quite tangibly VIA KT600 and even more - SiS748. Again, we would like to say that the performance of the dual-channel and single-channel NVIDIA solutions doesn’t differ that greatly.