Please take note of our system specs below, so you can draw fair comparisons on performance characteristics.

Intel Platform:
Pentium 4 Northwood at 2.2GHz & 2.4GHz
Pentium 4B Tehama at 2.4GHz & 2.53GHz
Motherboard and RAM Config #1
Intel D850EMV2 - i850E Motherboard - 533MHz FSB - PC800
256MB of Samsung PC800 RAMBUS RDRAM
Motherboard and RAM Config #2
Abit TH7II-RAID Motherboard - i850 533MHz and 400MHz FSB
(no RAID used but modified with 533MHz DRCGs)
256MB of Samsung PC800 RAMBUS RDRAM
(also set to PC1066 speeds)
Motherboard and RAM Config #3
SiS645dx Chipset Based Motherboard - 533MHz FSB
256MB of Crucial PC2700 DDR DRAM
Other Hardware and Software:
IBM DTLA307030 30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive
On board AC '97 Sound
Windows XP Professional
DirectX 8.1
GeForce4 Ti4600 128MB Graphics Card
nVidia Detonator 4 reference drivers version 28.32
Intel chipset drivers version 3.20

AMD Platform:
Athlon XP 2100+
Motherboard and RAM Config
Abit AT7 VIA KT333
256MB of Crucial PC2700 DDR DRAM
Other Hardware and Software:
IBM DTLA307030 30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive
On-Board AC '97 Sound
Windows XP Professional
DirectX 8.1
GeForce4 Ti4600 128MB Graphics Card
nVidia Detonator 4 reference drivers version 28.32
VIA 4-in-1 version 4.38a chipset drivers

CPUID 2.53GHz

What's not to love about all that great technology seen above here. Never before has the average end user had so much raw power at their disposal. Today's modern Personal Computers have more compute intensive capabilities than the average "professional" Super Computer of years gone by.

First, we'll tackle some quick Sandra benchmarks, to give you a feel for the level of performance of the new bus speed versus legacy i850 technology. We won't bring in reference AMD scores until we hit some "real-world" benchmarks in the following pages.

**Note: "PC1066" denotes use of TH7II-RAID i850
chipset board, 533MHz FSB and 533MHz RDRAM PC1066 memory speeds.
In addition, i850 scores shown here are representative of a 400MHz. FSB.

Alright then, a few notables are obvious here. First there is certainly an increase in overall memory subsystem bandwidth, in the i850E tests. Although the PC1066 scores are significantly higher than the i850E setup, the i850E handily out performs the standard i850 @ 2.4GHz. Perhaps that's due to the fact that the processor is running at 2.53GHz in that test, versus the stock 2.4GHz i850 setup. However, a look closely at the PC1066 scores of the 2.4GHz CPU. They are also significantly higher than even the i850E 2.53GHz scores.

Beyond that, the CPU and Multimedia scores correlate with their respective processor clock speeds. However, the PC1066 driven 2.53GHz setup certainly reigns supreme. With a 533MHz Front Side Bus and the help of 1.06GHz of RDRAM bandwidth, the results are as expected.