Anand's comparison of VC-SDRAM (VIA Apollo Pro 133A) and RDRAM (Intel 820):
anandtech.com
The VIA chipset had PC133 VC-SDRAM, but it was CAS-3, not CAS-2. Anand also tossed in non-VC PC133 with the VIA chipset, along with a 440BX system as well. The 820 system had RDRAM-800.
The highlights:
- Business Winstone 99 and BAPCo SYSMark 98 tests showed a virtual dead heat, with a spread of only a few percentage points.
- VIA's chipsets wins in Netshow Encoder and Naturally Speaking Professional, while the Intel 820 wins in Adobe Photoshop. BX was in last place in all three.
- Intel 820 wins in the synthetic Platform Bandwidth Test and the AGP-4x Transfer Test, the former by a wide margin. This isn't surprising, since both benchmarks were created by Intel.
- Intel 820 wins in Quake 3 Arena, but only by a few percentage points.
- Intel 820 beats everyone else in 3D Studio MAX by a significant margin.
- Virtual Channel technology only improved performance by a very miniscule amount in every benchmark. The exception was 3D Studio MAX where it improved performance significantly over non-VC SDRAM.
That last point is pretty interesting to me. Other than that, the VIA chipsets supporting PC133 SDRAM perform very well for the money. And as usual, RDRAM's performance benefits aren't very significant for today's applications, save for 3D Studio MAX.
My view still stands, that RDRAM will show better performance improvements in the future, especially as Coppermine is released and software starts to create more complex memory traffic patterns. Of course, that's a pretty hopeful and naive statement considering the current situation we're in, but hey, this thread could stand to see a little more optimism these days.
Tenchusatsu |
