Scumbria,
When you see benchmark scores from T-Bird with a fast L2 and DDR, you may be quite surprised!
Possibly. Every day's a new day with exciting new challenges. BTW, when is it due out? According to the same PC World article, it's Q3 or Q4. And Tenchusatsu, when is Willamette (sp?) due out?
In the meantime, here's some more good RDRAM news from PC World...
In their Top 100 tables in the back, RDRAM-based systems are showing up in the Top 10 Power PCs list. In fact, RDRAM-based systems now hold 3 of the top 5 positions in their Top 10 list!.
Here are the first 5 systems...
WorldBench 2000
Score
#1 Dell Dimension XPS B800r 201 $3469 RDRAM
#2 HP Vectra VL600 190 $2598 RDRAM
#3 Micron Millenia Max 800 149 $3099
#4 Axis Systems Orion CXV 132 $2057
#5 Dell OptiPlex GX300 165 $3467 RDRAM
Of the remaining systems, none score higher than 151 on the PC Worldbench 2000 score. PC World says that the 201 scored by the XPS B800r is "the highest score for any NT system we've ever seen."
So one of the obvious things that stand out is that while none of the SDRAM systems score higher than 151, the three RDRAM systems score 165, 190, and 201 on the Worldbench 2000 score. Ali? Are you there?
And for the price conscious, you can get the HP system with a score of 190 and a price tag of $2598 or you can spend an extra $500 and get the Micron system with a score of only 149. You decide.
Note that all of these systems except the Axis system are new to the list this month.
My guess is that we'll continue to see RDRAM systems take over the Power PC list (systems >$2000) and that within 3-5 months we'll see them begin to creep onto the Midrange systems list ($1200 to $2000).
This is the kind of PR we need and which drowns out any little quibbles we might have or any effect of Tom's Hardware. PC Magazine and PC World are two of the leading publications in the PC market with the widest circulation. The performance/benchmark tests showing these results are exactly what we said last Fall we needed to see. |
