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TESTING METHODOLOGY:
Due to this fact that
we, and we're sure you, have seen significant
variations in benchmark scores from one site to
the next, we feel it is necessary to explain
exactly how we configure our test systems before
running any benchmarks. When testing these boards,
the first thing we did was enter the system BIOSes
and set each board to "Load Optimized Defaults".
On the P4X400 DRAGON, we then set the "System
Performance" option to "Fast" and configured our
RAM to run at 166MHz (DDR333). We also set
the other memory timings to their most aggressive
settings, 2-2-5-2 with a 1T Command rate and
4-Bank Interleaving. The RAID array was then
formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP1) was
installed. After the installation was
complete, we hit the Windows Update site and
downloaded all of the available updates with the
exception of the ones related to Windows
Messenger. Then we installed all of the necessary
drivers, and disabled then removed Windows
Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and
System Restore were also disabled, and we setup a
768MB permanent page file on the same partition
and drive as the Windows installation. Lastly we
set the Visual Effects to "best performance",
installed all of the benchmarking software,
defragged the hard drive and ran all of the tests
at the CPU's default and overclocked speeds. Now, for our
results...
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The Hot Hardware Test Systems |
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Intel
Showcase... |
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Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz (2800MHz)
533MHz FSB
Soyo P4X400 DRAGON Ultra Platinum
VIA P4X400 Chipset
512MB GEiL PC3500 Platimun DDR RAM
NVIDIA
GeForce 4 Ti 4600 (40.72 Drivers)
On-Board
NIC
On-Board
Sound
Western
Digital 80GB 7200RPM HDx2
Creative
Labs 52X CD-Rom
Standard
Floppy Drive
Windows XP
Professional with SP1
VIA 4-in-1
Drivers v4.43
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Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz (2800MHz)
533MHz FSB
Abit TH7II-RAID
Intel i850 Chipset
512MB Kingston PC1066 RDRAM
NVIDIA
GeForce 4 Ti 4600 (40.72 Drivers)
3Com
3C905-TX NIC
On-Board
Sound
Western
Digital 80GB 7200RPM HDx2
Creative
Labs 52X CD-Rom
Standard
Floppy Drive
Windows XP
Professional with SP1
Intel
Chipset Drivers v4.04.1007
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Performance Comparisons with SiSoft
SANDRA |
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Synthetic
Action |
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SANDRA
(the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic
and Reporting Assistant) is an
information and diagnostic utility put out by the
folks at SiSoftware. Besides benchmarking, it
provides a host of other information about your
hardware and operating system. We began our
testing with the built-in CPU, Multimedia, File
System and Memory sub-system tests
that are part of the SANDRA 2002 suite. We
ran these tests at our CPU's default clock speed
of 2.8GHz and while overclocked to 2.98GHz.
CPU @ 2.80GHz
CPU @ 2.98GHz
(21X133MHz)
(21x142MHz)
CPU @ 2.80GHz
CPU @ 2.98GHz
(21X133MHz)
(21x142MHz)
HARD DRIVE
(RAID 0)
CPU @ 2.80GHz
CPU @ 2.98GHz
(21X133MHz)
(21x142MHz)
When compared to all
of the reference systems in SANDRA's database, the
Soyo P4X400 DRAGON / P4 2.8GHz combo put up some
nice numbers, besting every other system listed.
The CPU and Multimedia scores were right in-line
where you'd expect a Pentium 4 2.8 to be.
File System performance was also very good.
We use two Western Digital 80GB "Special Edition"
drives in a RAID 0 configuration, and saw
performance that was slightly higher than SANDRA's
reference scores. The Memory bandwidth
results left something to be desired though.
As we mentioned earlier, we were not able to test
the board at DDR400 memory speeds. At DDR333
speeds, with aggressive memory timings (2-2-5-2
with a 1T Command rate and 4-Bank Interleaving),
the DRAGON barely broke 2.1GB/s, a full 600MB/s
lower than the theoretical 2.7GB/s peak. When we
overclocked the system we gained about another
100MB/s. These memory bandwidth scores are
decent, but they fall behind other DDR333 capable
P4 chipsets like the
i845PE and
SiS648.
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Performance Comparisons with PC Mark
2002 |
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CPU,
Memory and Hard Drive Testing |
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Next, we
used MadOnion's PCMark 2002 benchmarking
suite. Like other synthetic benchmarks, it's
tough to translate PCMark 2002 scores into "real
world" performance. However, because
it is very simple to run, and produces repeatable,
comparable
results, PCMark 2002 has become a staple in the
H.H. labs. We ran PCMark's "CPU" and "Memory"
performance modules on the P4X400 DRAGON and on an
RDRAM powered system based on Abit's very popular
TH7II-RAID. The CPU module incorporates
the following tests:
CPU
Test:
As you can see, CPU
performance in PCMark 2002 was almost identical
between the two systems...which is to be expected.
With the current batch of Pentium 4s, CPU
performance should be similar across all chipsets.
It's going to be interesting to see how
third-party chipsets perform with the new
Hyper-Threading enabled CPUs Intel had in the
works though. Something tells me we'll
revisit this topic in the not-so-distant future.
Memory
Test Technical details: (Quoted From MadOnion)
Raw
read, write, and read-modify-write operations are
performed starting from a 3072 kilobytes array
decreasing in size to 1536 KB, 384 KB, 48 KB and
finally 6 KB. Each size of block is tested two second
and the amount of accessed data is given as result. In
the STL container test a list of 116 byte elements is
constructed and sorted by an integer pseudo-random
key. The list is then iterated through as many times
as possible for 2 seconds and the total size of the
accessed elements is given as result. There are 6 runs
of this test, with 24576 items in the largest run
corresponding to a total data amount of 1536 KB,
decreasing in size to 12288 items (768 KB), 6144 items
(384 KB), 1536 items (96 KB), 768 items (48 KB) and 96
items in the smallest run corresponding to 6 KB of
total data.
Love it, or hate it,
there is no denying, RDRAM is the way to go if
you're looking for massive amounts of memory
bandwidth for the Pentium 4. In PCMark's
Memory module, the i850 powered TH7II-RAID
outperformed the Soyo P4X400 DRAGON by almost 1100
points, or 18.2%. Let's move on to some
"Real-World" tests next...
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Gaming & The Winstones
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