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To: richard surckla who wrote (86272)	5/7/2003 3:17:45 PM
From: Don Green	Respond to of 93625

Fast Bus, but Catch It Later 875P chip set offers an 800-MHz bus but little performance boost, for now. Laurianne McLaughlin From the June 2003 issue of PC World magazine Posted Wednesday, May 07, 2003 Intel just put a new bus on the road, but PC users looking for top performance may want to wait and catch a later ride. Intel's new 875P chip set provides Pentium 4 PCs with an 800-MHz frontside bus and dual-channel DDR400 SDRAM memory--but we saw little performance gain over an older chip set in our lab tests of three of the first new systems, except in a few very demanding applications like AutoCAD. Previously, high-end P4 systems used a 533-MHz frontside bus and RDRAM memory. Note that Intel has also released a 3-GHz P4 to match the new bus. Meanwhile, AMD Athlon XP 3000+ units remain faster in several tests and less costly than the new P4 machines. PCs with the new chip set carry no price premium, but if you're an Intel fan, there's another reason to hold off: A big P4 improvement is coming later this year that should take greater advantage of the 875P. An 800-MHz Gimmick? So what's the deal with the new bus? It's a marketing tool for now, but it helps Intel prepare for the future, says Kevin Krewell, general manager at research firm In-Stat/MDR. Most of today's software does not push the P4 hard enough to require this bus and its extra bandwidth, he says. (The older 533-MHz bus has a maximum throughput of 4.2GB per second; the 800-MHz one tops out at 6.4 GBps.) That certainly seemed true in tests of three preproduction 3-GHz P4 PCs with the 875P: a $2999 Dell Dimension 8300, a $3845 Falcon Northwest Mach V, and a $3499 Gateway 700XL, all with 1GB of DDR400 SDRAM. For comparison, we tested a similarly configured Mach V with a 3.06-GHz P4, a 533-MHz frontside bus, and 1GB of PC1066 RDRAM. Though the Falcon with the 800-MHz bus ran PC World Bench 4 fastest with a 127 score, the Falcon with a 533-MHz bus was only 2 points slower, and three previously tested 3.06-GHz P4 PCs with RDRAM averaged 121. Such differences are too small to notice in productivity apps. However, the 800-MHz bus and DDR400 RAM did seem to yield a noticeable boost in tests that push system and memory strength: the AutoCAD test and the Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Unreal Tournament game tests. For example, the newer Falcon zipped through the AutoCAD test in 256 seconds, beating the comparison Falcon's time of 265 seconds. The Dell finished in just 253 seconds. (All PCs used a high-end ATI Radeon graphics card.) In most other tests, the new bus made little difference. idg.net