Intel 820 'Camino' Chipset

by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 27, 1999 2:31 AM EST

We already know that there is no visible performance increase when using AGP 4X with current game titles (sound familiar?) simply because the amount of AGP texturing is very limited to the point that we don't need 1.06GB/s worth of bandwidth.  Therefore there's no point in giving you even more Quake 3 scores for AGP 4X performance. 

At the same time, we have also learned that under Windows 98, the performance of the i820 chipset is either equivalent to or slower than the BX by a few percent.  So where do the real performance differences emerge?  In high bandwidth utilization situations, aka, under Windows NT.

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The High End Winstone 99 test proves that the PC800 RDRAM does help in the situations where a lower latency isn't going to be the deciding factor.  In applications such as Photoshop and CAD Drafting applications where a lot of data needs to be moved around the RDRAM on the i820 system pulls it ahead of the BX.  It is interesting to note that the use of the 133MHz FSB didn't really do all that much for the i820 test bed.

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We see a similar situation here, however with the larger amount of tests run in the SYSMark 98 suite, the performance difference is more well defined. 

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The greatest performance difference comes with the 3D Studio MAX test which is centered entirely around moving a lot of data.  Once again, note the relatively tiny performance increase gained by the 133MHz FSB.

RDRAM Performance Comparison Final Words
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