Time for someone from Intel or Rambus to step up with some final numbers, before Intel goes back to $45, and Rambus goes to $10. If this is a hoax or a fabrication, someone from Intel should say so.
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gotapex.com
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I can't take a picture of it. My rep at Intel said that's a no-no. However, the good news is I am allowed to say all about how it performs and what it includes.
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What I have is one of Intel's two i820 chipset motherboards, the VC820. The i820 is meant to replace the aging BX chipset as Intel's flagship desktop product. Here are a few items for us to drool over:
133/100mhz FSB speeds
Asynchronous AGP and PCI/IDE speeds (no more worry with overclocking your peripherials, at least according to sources at Intel. YET UNCONFIRMED, as this motherboard cannot overclock)
Accelerated Hub Architecture
Support for the Coppermine CPU
Native support for Rambus at 600 and 800mhz
Native support for UltraDMA/66
PC99 compliant (no ISA slots. Woohoo!!)
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Anyhow, on to the test configuration.
Motherboard: Preproduction Intel VC820
CPU: Preproduction Intel Pentium III 533B (3.6nS Latency 1 SRAM)
Intel Pentium III 550 (3.6nS Latency 1 SRAM)
Intel Pentium III 500 (4.0nS Latency 8 SRAM)
Memory: 64MB 800Mhz Rambus RIMM
Video: Diamond Viper 770 Ultra AGP4X TNT2 at 175mhz core, 200mhz memory, nVidia drivers v2.17
Hard Drive: Western Digital ATA/33 6.4G
CD-ROM: Sony 40X
OS: Windows 98 SE
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Conclusion
Despite all of the apparent advantages the i820 had going for it, it was still beaten quite handily by the BX motherboard. The i820 has a supposingly more efficient Accelerated Hub Architecture, AGP 4X, a 133mhz Frontside Bus, and Rambus memory. The BX motherboard, on the otherhand, is still sailing on yesterday's technology. So how did this all come about?
Well, it's difficult to draw any definite conclusions as of yet. There are still alot of unanswered questions. However, I will point out a few observations:
The inf drivers. The drivers for the i820's system devices are probably not in their final form. I'm sure they will be improved in the days to come.
I only tested the system with 64MB of ram. Even though the BX board was also tested with only 64MB, I noticed the i820 system was using the swapdisk MUCH more heavily. This caused very frequent pausing in Quake III, and was probably the leading cause in the skewing of the results. Perhaps with Rambus, you need more memory? I can not say for sure as of yet.
All in all, we only ran a few tests. A wider range of applications may show differing results. Initial results starting to appear on the web do look grim for Rambus based systems, however. Look at some from Dell here.
i820 chipset motherboards with Coppermine CPU's may show vastly different results then when mated with Katmai processors. Until then, we can only hope.
So... don't throw out those old BX motherboards yet. Hopefully, Intel will be able to take care of these performance issues. If they do, you'll be sure to hear about it from us, if not then the defection rate to AMD is going to run rather high.
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Maybe they ARE being forced to use NAP mode after all, since the "wind tunnel" was rejected by the boxmakers, and this performance is the result. Dell could be in big trouble too. It didn't make much sense for VIA to tell Intel to buzz off unless the final numbers really are going to come in something like these.
Dan |
