Tuesday, April 02, 2002

The memory tests

Sisoft Sandra 2002

2.2ghz P4 Northwood DDR266 Click here for a larger image	2.4ghz P4 Northwood DDR266 Click here for a larger image
2.4ghz P4 Northwood Rambus Click here for a larger image	Athlon XP 2100+ DDR266 Click here for a larger image
Athlon XP 2100+ DDR333 Click here for a larger image

Below are two seperate tables detailing the results of the floating-point and integer performance tests of our test systems.

As you can see, Intel Pentium 4 systems provide some great results when coupled with PC800 RAMBUS memory. That said, they still manage to maintain a lead when mated to DDR-SDRAM, though they are trailed quite closely by the AMD Athlon XP systems.

It's also worth noting that the AMD systems see fairly meager performance increases when using DDR333/PC2700 memory. This seems to be a result of the fact that present Athlon XP CPUs are designed for a 133mhz (DDR266) FSB, with a maximum transfer rate of 2.1GB/sec. DDR333 memory, on the other hand, has a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 2.7GB/sec, as a result of its 166mhz clock-speed. Unfortunately, the Athlon platform isn't current designed for memory transfers of that speed, so most users won't see much benefit unless they can Overclock their system bus to 166mhz.

Conversely, the Intel systems are well equipped to take advantage of DDR333 memory, as the P4 has a theoretical transfer rate of 3.2GB/sec - considerably higher than that of DDR266. In fact, Intel platforms could quite very well use a memory bus speeds of 200mhz, which would allow for the use of DDR400 RAM - which would be the first memory product, asides from RAMBUS products, to achieve 3.2GB/sec in bandwidth.

Next: Linpack.