Date:
Sunday , April 13, 2003
Author:
Kyle Bennett
Editor:
Steve Lynch
Google +1

Intel's 875P "Canterwood" & 800MHz FSB P4

We look at the new i875P Canterwood chipset and the Dual Channel DDR400 that it brings with it. And of course we show off the 800MHz Front Side Bus and one of the Pentium 4s built to do it.

continued...

Test Systems

As always, we like to use an enthusiast retail board to test with, as we suspect this will best represent you guys out there. We elected the ABIT IC7-G to serve as our benchmark board. All of the boards we tested have delivered benchmark scores that are very much the same at stock 3GHz CPU defaults.

Pentium 4 Systems:

ABIT IC7-G Mainboard, 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS TwinX DDR400, ATI Radeon 9700 Pro w/ ATI Catalyst 2.3 drivers, 40 GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD, Enermax 550w PSU, WindowsXP w/SP1, ATi Catalyst 6178, Intel Chipset Drivers version 5.00.1009.

Intel Pentium 4 CPUs: 2.8GHz (OCed to 15*200 for non-HT scores), 3.06GHz (stock 23*133), and 3.00GHz (stock 15*200 / OCed to 12*250).

AMD System:

ASUS A7N8X (nForce2): AMD AthlonXP 3000+ CPU (clocked at 13x166); 2 x 256MB Kingston HyperX PC3500; ATI Radeon 9700 Pro w/ ATI Catalyst 2.3 drivers, 40 GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD, Vantec 550w PSU. WindowsXP w/SP1, ATi Catalyst 6178. NVIDIA NF 2.03 chipset drivers.

Benchmark Speeds

Take a moment to understand exactly what the labeling on our benchmarks stand for, as there is a lot of information to convey. We will use our stock benchmark for example.

"3GHzHT-800-DC400" = 3GHz CPU Clock / with HyperThreading Technology / 800MHz Front Side Bus / Dual Channel 400MHz DDR

The omission of "HT" or "DC" reflects the absence of that specification.

Bandwidth & Application Benchmarks

SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth Benchmark

Article Image

The red bar represents our stock system. It is almost hard to fathom where we were last week compared to where we are this week with Intel desktop chipsets. It is what can certainly be looked at as a huge leap, as now days we are used to seeing incremental movements. Do keep in mind that this is a synthetic benchmark and does not represent much. What it really does show is that the CPU has the ability to utilize the large amounts of bandwidth available to it.

Notice also the white bar compared to the red. This represents a 50MHz increase in the FSB and no increase in the memory bus speed. Widening the CPU bus alone alleviates a bottleneck and allows the bandwidth to flow.

Comparing the blue bar to the white bar, we are showing what an increase of the memory bus to 1100MHz FSB with DDR440MHz will allow. We have not posted any more of these benchmarks, as it is nearly impossible to find quality sticks of RAM that will reliably qualify at that speed. Our samples were hand-picked and supplied to us directly out of Taiwan.

ZD Business Winstone 2002

Article Image

The AMD AthlonXP 3000+ shines in this benchmark, as it always does. We contribute this to a shorter pipeline and much stronger FPU operation that does not require special instruction coding. The Intel scores are flat when compared with each other until HyperThreading is teamed with the accelerated 1GHz FSB. Still, in a business environment, we see little need to move from the current 533MHz bus parts.

ZD Content Creation Winstone 2003

Article Image

Our Content Creation scores do show a bit more fluctuation, as they are much more dependent on FSB and memory bandwidth instead of being more CPU clock oriented like our business applications. Our AMD CPU gets blown away by the Intel's advanced instruction capability and high bandwidth qualities, as these content creation applications crave both.

The numbers scale like you might think they should, with HyperThreading and FSB both impacting the final score. Of course, a 1GHz FSB along with HyperThreading show to be king.

dB Power AMD - MP3 Conversion

.wav to .mp3 conversion of a 119MB sound file using the LAME based encoder.

Article Image

If you suspected LAME encoding to be 100% clock dependent, you would be very correct.

Next up...gaming.