SiS 730S Socket-A Chipset: Is the Duron allowed to succeed now?

ZDM’s Business Winstone 2001 is more of a real world business application performance test.  The test involves multitasking among various business applications such as MS Word and Excel as well as while browsing locally stored web pages using Netscape, unzipping files, etc…  This obviously makes the test very disk intensive and thus disk limited. 

The 730S is just approximately 1% slower than the KT133 here which is definitely acceptable, it’s a much better margin than what we saw under SYSMark 2000.  This could be because of the fact that Business Winstone 2001 is more disk limited than SYSMark 2000, introducing a limitation that isn’t allowing the performance gap to grow between the KT133 and the 730S.

Another possibility is that these tests, being relatively simple in nature, aren’t taxing enough of the memory bus to bring any differences between the two chipsets to light.  In order to answer this question let’s have a look at a slightly more memory intensive test from ZDM, Content Creation Winstone 2001.

It looks like our theory held true.  Content Creation Winstone 2001 follows the same benchmarking model as Business Winstone 2001 however instead of running business applications, as the name implies, CC Winstone 2001 runs content creation applications such as Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Dreamweaver. 

These applications and their normal usage patterns are inherently much more memory intensive than the usual crop of business applications simply because most of them can’t just fit within a large L2 cache and must store/retrieve the bulk of their data from system memory. 

This seems to help exemplify the differences in the memory performance of the KT133 and 730S chipsets, allowing the KT133 to pull away from the 730S with a 7% performance lead.  Again we remind you that in these tests the 730S isn’t using its integrated video, making the only difference between the 730S and the KT133 platforms the actual chipsets themselves.