Here is an excerpt from the latest Maximum PC magazine(JAN 2002)The Speed Issue
maximumpc.com
page 33.
dg> This magazine article was scanned from magazine article because it is not online, sorry for any typos!Tables not include check out the magazine.
What's the fastest Pentium 4 Memory type: RDRAM, DDR, or PC133?
Methodology: In an ideal world, we run this speed trial with a single motherboard that supports all three memory types. That way, memory performance would be completely isolated, and we wouldn’t have to worry about variables such as chipset performance and the vagaries of PCB layouts and circuit lengths. The problem is, no P4 motherboard comes with slots for all three memory types, and even if some boards did offer support for more than one memory type, they would have to resort to the use of memory translators. Translator tomfoolery ultimately punishes the performance of at least one of the memory types, so we didn't want to go this route. The solution was to run this speed trial with four separate mobos (one mobo each for RDRAM and PC133, and two mobos for DDR). So, in the end, this is really a showdown among memory/chipset/mobo combos. That stated, we're confident we'll be able to glean much insight about memory performance from the results.
Because Intel is the only manufacturer of RDRAM chipsets (SiSs RDRAM chipset wasn't available at press time), we selected the Intel 850 chipset sitting atop an Intel D850MD “Maryland" motherboard to carry the RDRAM, banner.
Featuring two RDRAM channels good for 3.2GB/sec of theoretical bandwidth ?the 850 has been the performance Pentium 4 chipset since the P4s introduction. For this speed trial, we used two 128MB PC800 RIMMs from Kingston Representing PC133 memory was the Intel 845 chipset sitting atop an Asus P4B mobo. Perhaps the best PC133 Pentium 4 motherboard around, the P4B was configured with two 128MB PC133 CL2 memory modules from Crucial Technology.
On the DDR front, our first contender was a Shuttle AV40/R mobo using the P4X266 chipset, VIA’s unauthorized DDR offering for Pentium 4 (Intel and VIA
are locked in a legal tussle over whether VIA even has a right to build P4 chipsets). We locked in a 256MB, CL2, PC2100 DIMM from Crucial Technology.
Intel isn't supposed to release its own DDR Pentium 4 chipset until early 2002,
but we pulled a fast one and obtained an ultra?secret motherboard that uses Intel's upcoming 845D chipset. Featuring support for both 20OMHz and 266MHZ DDR SDRAM we populated the board with 256MB Crucial module used in the VIA based DDR Mobo.
As for the remaining hardware, all four of the test rigs were identical. We used a Leadtek GeForce3 videocard with 21.83 Detonator 4 drivers and identical IBM 60GXP hard drives. We disabled onboard audio and RAID controllers, ran fresh installs of WinXP Professional, and grabbed the latest drivers and BIOS updates for each motherboard. All tests were conducted with identical 2GHz Socket 478 Pentium 4 CPUs. All four frontside bus speeds were identical: 100MHz, quad?pumped.
Our benchmarks featured the usual suspects: the content creation portion of SY5mark2001, Maximum PCs own in?house Quake ///demo, our standard in?house Adobe Premiere 6.0 rendering test, and MusicMatcht to test high?quality MP3 encoding. We also selected the synthetic SiSoft Sandra 2001 RAM benchmark (for its ability to measure memory bandwidth in best?case scenarios) as well as Sandra 2001's CPU/ Dhrystone benchmark. As Intel likes to note, even the creator of Dhrystone has said the test offers nominal value in measuring the performance of modem CPUs.This makes it a dubious benchmark when comparing two opposingCPU architectures likeAthlon XP and Pentium 4. But the test can provide some insight when comparing different mobo/chipset/memory combos based on the same CPU platform.
We also included our old Adobe Photoshop action script, as well as the overall 3DMark2001 test.
RESULTS: Even a cursory glance at the benchmark chart will show you that RDRAM easily defeats PC133 SDRAM. This should be no surprise: 133MHz memory just can't keep the Pentium 4s 400MHz bus stoked with enough material to chew on. The result was an almost across?the?board performance hit. The only benchmarks in which the PC133/845 combo didn't significantly lag were the SiSoft Sandra CPU and MusicMatch tests. In fact, the similarity of all four SiSoft Sandra CPU scores tells us that if all your applications isolate the CPU and never hit a main system memory or you r hard drive, you’ll get similar performance, mobo/chipset/memory combos notwithstanding.
The DDR/VIA combo turned in very respectable performance. In fact, in our benchmarks, it generally represented a middle ground between the RDRAM/850 and the PC133/845 combos. The surprise came from Intel's own DDR/845D combo, which is scheduled for release in early January. The conventional wisdom has always been that Intel is sandbagging DDR in order to protect the adoption of RDRAM.That may well be true, because Intel's long?overdue take on DDR looks to be a serious threat to RDRAM and could spell the end of the controversial memory type. The DDR/845D combo's SYSmark2001 score matched that of the RDRAM/850 combo, and beat RDRAM/850 in MusicMatch, Premiere, Photoshop, and SiSoft Sandra CPU.
RDRAM/850's superior bandwidth gave it an easy win in the synthetic SiSoft Sandra memory bandwidth test, as well as 3DMark2001. In applications that truly need the bandwidth, such as Quake 1/1, RDRAM/850 still has an edge (and, as the scores indicate, PC133/845 still has a handicap). We should also note that OEMs who’ve tested Northwood, the next iteration of P4, say the upcoming CPUs higher speeds and increased L2 cache size give RDRAM/850 a speed advantage over DDR.That advantage may be dulled, however, when Intel's DDR platform supports DDR333, the looming high speed update to PC2100. |
