Rambus DRAM Part 2: Performance

Windows 2000 Performance

Under Windows 2000 the only problem we encountered was that our ASUS P3V4X would not reliably complete some tests with the Detonator 5.16 drivers loaded. We are currently investigating the problem which hasn't been solved by the latest release of VIA chipset drivers for Windows 2000. Because of this, the Apollo Pro 133A chipset is absent from this comparison under Windows 2000.

The BX at 133MHz comes out on top yet again, low latency combined with just enough memory bandwidth for today's applications and benchmarks results in quite a deadly combination, at least for the i820/840 + RDRAM platforms.

The BX133 comes out on top yet again, the only interesting thing here is that the i840 managed to come out slightly below the i820. The reason behind this is most likely that the Intel OR840 board isn't as optimized for performance as our ASUS P3C-E which is reasonable since Intel motherboards have always been geared more towards stability and have generally been incapable of outperforming their Taiwanese counterparts.

This helps to illustrate the fact that we are currently at a point where we can't use 3.2GB/s of memory bandwidth, at least on a desktop system, thus giving the i820 platform the opportunity to step ahead of the i840 setup because of differences in the way the motherboard's BIOS is tweaked.