Date:
Monday , October 08, 2001
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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SiS645 P4 / DDR333 Preview

Some of you might be sitting around thinking that people like VIA and Intel rule the chipset world. Well, it was not too long ago that it was thought that only Intel could build a chipset. Silicon Integrated Systems is now building a Pentium4 DDR chipset and they have Intel's blessing.

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Test Systems:

SiS645: SiS Reference board, Intel 2GHz P4, 256MB KingMax PC2700, VisionTek GeForce3 Ti500, Vantec HSF, NETGEAR FA311 NIC, 30GB Western Digital HD, Enermax 550 watt PSU.

KT266A: VIA Reference KT266A Board, AMD 1.4GHz TBird clocked at 1.4GHz (10.5*133), 256MB Corsair PC2400, VisionTek GeForce3 Ti500, NETGEAR FA311 NIC, 30GB Western Digital HD, Enermax 550 watt PSU.

i850: ABIT TH7II-RAID mainboard, Intel Pentium4 2GHz CPU, 512MB Kingston Rambus, Stock Intel HSF, VisionTek GeForce3 VidCard, NetGear FA311 NIC, Western Digital 30GB HD, Enermax 550 watt PSU.

Windows 2000 Professional SP2 / DX8, NVIDIA 21.85WHQL, VIA 4n1s ver. 4.32.

All benchmarks are made to be as much of an apples to apples comparison as possible. Be aware that while our i850 board has twice the amount of Ram, we have shown in the past that this not really yield higher scores on the benchmarks we run. On the other side of things, we have a Ti500 running in the other two systems and a vanilla GF3 in the i850. This should not effect the scores much either, considering we tested all three boards in non-3D benchmarks. Benchmarks involving 3D applications will include only the two DDR boards with the same graphics card.

Benchmarks:

We can sit around and talk all day, but benchmarks show us whether or not there is any real promise in this technology. SiSoft Sandra has a brand new version coming out, and this is a final of it. The comparative values are up to date and have shown to be very worthwhile.

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The important comparison here is the P4 to P4. Our SiS645 Chipset shows no signs of holding our CPU back at all when pushed to its limits, and it even surpasses the P4X266 in our testing.

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Again, we see the CPU act like it should, mirroring the internal SiSoft Sandra data as well as much of our own that we have seen recently while working with the Pentium4.

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There is no doubt that the DDR333 is faster than the P4X266 in relation to raw data movement. Still, benchmarks of this type do not show the true performance of our reference board. However, they certainly show the infrastructure of the motherboard to be working properly, or at least the way we think it should, when compared to the other platforms we have seen tested recently.