SiS 645: Pentium 4 DDR - Take II

Internet Content Creation & Office Productivity Performance

SYSMark 2001 is another favorite, especially considering that it is definitely not as disk-bound as Winstone although both are equally useful.

Internet Content Creation Performance Internet Content Creation SYSMark 2001 SiS 645 (DDR333) Intel 850 (PC800) SiS 645 (DDR266) VIA P4X266 (DDR266) 217 215 213 212 | 0 | 43 | 87 | 130 | 174 | 217 | 260

The SYSMark definition of Internet Content Creation involves much more than just running a few content creation applications. A good portion of the performance in this benchmark comes from running an avi through Windows Media Encoder while using Dragon Dictate, a speech recognition program, along with a handful of other content creation applications. While you would expect all of this to put a heavy load on memory bandwidth, it doesn't. In fact, there is only a 2% spread between the top and bottom performers here. Strength in content creation comes from strength in the Pentium 4, not just its memory bandwidth.

Office Productivity Performance Office Productivity SYSMark 2001 SiS 645 (DDR333) Intel 850 (PC800) SiS 645 (DDR266) VIA P4X266 (DDR266) 165 163 163 158 | 0 | 33 | 66 | 99 | 132 | 165 | 198

We get a repeat of the results here under the office productivity tests; there simply isn't a large enough spread to even bother splitting hairs between these contenders.

Overall Performance SYSMark 2001 SiS 645 (DDR333) Intel 850 (PC800) SiS 645 (DDR266) VIA P4X266 (DDR266) 217 215 213 212 | 0 | 43 | 87 | 130 | 174 | 217 | 260

The overall performance picture that's painted is identical to what we saw in the previous tests; the SiS 645 equipped with DDR333 SDRAM comes out on top but the performance advantage isn't significant (only 2% over the P4X266, less than 1% over the 850).