Memory Performance
Normally we can take a look at the memory bandwidth and latency scores and generally predict the outcome of the rest of the review, at least when it comes to chipsets. However, with the Pentium 4 the situation isn't as predictable. It was clear from our P4X266 Review that the the 3.2GB/s of memory bandwidth offered by the i850 chipset wasn't all being used, but how much is necessary for today's Pentium 4 processors and applications? We'll find out throughout the course of this review, but as usual we'll start with some theory:
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1592In spite of having a 19% theoretical bandwidth advantage, the i850 is able to offer a 26% memory bandwidth lead over the DDR333 SiS 645. It's difficult to say exactly what we can attribute this to but we can hazard two guesses. Either RDRAM is simply more efficient than DDR SDRAM on the Pentium 4 platform or the SiS 645 platform has some untapped potential that is not being exploited in the reference board. We're leaning towards the latter judging by SiS' warning that the board we were testing hadn't been tuned for performance and our own observations on the matter. Time will only tell once production boards hit the streets.
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Here we see a clear latency advantage by SiS only when operating in DDR333 mode. The 645 actually offers higher latency memory accesses than the P4X266 in DDR266 mode. In spite of this, none of the solutions come close to the 850 in terms of memory latency. Now it's time to see how these figures translate into real world performance.
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