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Hot
Hardware Test System |
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VIA vs Intel...what more can you say? |
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TEST BOARDS:
VIA
P4PB Ultra (P4X400)
MSI 845PE Max2 (i845PE)
Gigabyte 8PE667 Ultra (i845PE)
COMMON HARDWARE:
Intel Pentium 4 2.26
GHz 533MHz FSB
512MB Corsair PC3200 DDR
Chaintech GeForce 4 Ti 4600
On-board AC'97 audio
Western Digital WD200BB ATA100 7200rpm 20GB Hard
Drive
Creative Labs 52x CD-ROM
Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1
VIA P4PB using Hyperion 4.46
drivers
Intel based boards
using:
Intel Chipset Drivers, version 4.00.1013
Intel Application
Accelerator, version 2.2.2
nVidia Detonator
Drivers, version 41.03
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TESTING
METHODOLOGY:
On all
of the boards in our test, we started off by
manually optimizing the BIOS settings to the most
aggressive system options available to us. The
memory frequency was manually set to DDR333 with the
CAS timings set to 2-5-5-2. The hard drive was
formatted, and Windows XP Professional with Service
Pack 1 was installed. After the Windows installation
was complete, we installed the necessary chipset
drivers for each platform and Intel'sd Application
Accelerator on the Intel boards. We then
installed the drivers for the rest of the
components, using the drivers supplied on the CD,
except for the Geforce Ti 4600. For the
Geforce card, we downloaded and installed the latest
nVidia reference drivers at the time of testing,
version 41.03.
Auto-Updating, Hibernation, and System Restore were
disabled, and then we set up a 768MB permanent page
file. Lastly, we installed all of the
benchmarking software, defragged the machine, and
rebooted. After completing the initial round
of benchmarks, we went back into the BIOS and
enabled DDR400 settings for the VIA P4PB board,
which claims to have complete DDR400 support.
In order to do so, however, we needed to lower the
CAS settings for the memory to 2.5.
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Benchmarking with SiSoft Sandra 2002 Pro |
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Starting with the Synthetic... |
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SANDRA (the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic
and Reporting Assistant) is an information and
diagnostic utility put out by the folks at SiSoftware.
It's a quick and easy
way to compare the CPU, Memory, and Hard drive performance
of a given system against an internal database of similar
systems and drives. These benchmarks are theoretical scores,
and can't necessarily be measured in real-world terms, but
provide a good way to make comparisons amongst like
components. For each test that we ran, we chose
components from the database list that we thought would be
found in comparable mainstream PCs. We ran a set of
tests when using DDR333 timings for the RAM, with CAS2
settings and then again after raising the level to DDR400
but at CAS 2.5.
CPU Test
DDR333
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CPU Test
DDR400
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Using either
memory speed, the system posted good scores that were within
points of each other, and represented a level that a 2.26
GHz Pentium 4 should probably fall into. There was no
direct choice within Sandra for the same CPU to give a
direct comparison from the database. It was
interesting to see the slight flip-flop of the two scores.
Using DDR333, the dhrystone score was slightly higher than
the DDR400, but the DDR400 had the higher whetstone score.
Still, both scores are within a hairbreadth of each other.
Multimedia Test
DDR333
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Multimedia Test
DDR400
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We found the
same, however slight, shift between the two scores in the
multimedia test as well. At DDR333, the Integer Point
calculations are one-up on the DDR333 scores, while the
Floating Point calculations score is favored in the DDR400
side. Still, both are indicative of the performance of
a 2.26 GHz Pentium 4 CPU but well within the margin of error
for this test. The Integer score is fair, while the
Floating Point is the second highest on the charts, just
behind the database score for a 2.4GHz P4.
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Memory Test
DDR333
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Memory Test
DDR400
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In the memory tests, we can
see how the extra bandwidth provided by the DDR400 timings
should increase overall system performance. In the
first set of scores, the VIA board produced scores that were
in line with, if not slightly better than comparable scores
for two other P4 board chipset manufacturers, Intel and SiS.
With respect to the scores for an Intel i845PE with DDR400
versus the P4X400 board at the same setting, the P4X400 VIA
P4PB Ultra falls a bit off the mark. This could be
partly due to the fact that we had to lower the CAS ratings
in order to get a stable working system.
Hard Drive
Performance
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The hard drive performance benchmark produced a pretty good
score for a single drive, just missing the 30,000 mark.
It easily beat out all of the drives we chose as
comparisons, except for the one with the 8MB cache.
Futuremark's benchmarks take the stage |