Tom's Hardware Guide published a new 820 chipset review:
tomshardware.com
I'm surprised this wasn't posted before. It seems that Tom is seeing better performance with the 820 chipset and RDRAM than before. (You all remember the infamous test of the pre-release 820 which helped fuel the arguments against Rambus?)
In general, the 820 chipset with RDRAM shows marginal improvement over 440BX in office benchmarks and in games. The improvement was a little better in memory-intensive apps like Netshow Encoder, Photoshop, and much better in a custom Intel benchmark which emphasizes heavy use of AGP textures.
It should be noted that the VIA Apollo Pro 133 was also tested, but it failed to beat the 820 chipset in any benchmark. The VIA chipset also fell behind the 440BX in most benchmarks as well. However, Tom didn't mention what kind of memory he was using for the VIA chipset. His only mention of the type of memory used was "128MB Viking PC100 CAS2," but he didn't say whether this was used in both the VIA and the 440BX, or just the 440BX. I can't imagine why he'd want to cripple the VIA with PC100 SDRAM.
Of course, the benefits of 820 *were* marginal, so I guess once again it will come down to a question of value.
Notable quote from Tom: Do we need i820? Well, we need it just as urgently as SSE, breast implants and hair transplantations.
I guess Britney Spears and William Shatner will be the first two customers of 820, no? ;-0 (Just kidding. For the record, I don't believe Britney ... er ... is artificial.)
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