AMD 690 Chipset Update: More Power, More Performance
PCMark05: CPU and Memory
For our next round of synthetic benchmarks, we ran the CPU and memory performance modules built into Futuremark's PCMark05 suite.
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"The CPU test suite is a collection of tests that are run to isolate the performance of the CPU. The CPU Test Suite also includes multithreading: two of the test scenarios are run multithreaded; the other including two simultaneous tests and the other running four tests simultaneously. The remaining six tests are run single threaded. Operations include, File Compression/Decompression, Encryption/Decryption, Image Decompression, and Audio Compression" - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.
The updates AMD made to the 690 chipset software and BIOS had no impact on processor performance according to PCMark05's CPU performance module. The two 690-based boards we tested performed almost identically here.
"The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing." - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.
PCMark05's memory performance module did report a slight advantage for the newer Gigabyte 690-based motherboard. The difference is less than 30 points, but we did expect the updated board to exhibit somewhat better performance here considering its advantage in the SANDRA memory benchmark on the previous page.
