Intel's New DDR Chipsets - 845E & 845G

Internet Content Creation & General Usage Performance

With this review we continue to use SYSMark 2002; SYSMark 2002 can be considered to be a much more memory bandwidth intensive version of the Winstone tests. The benchmark is split into two parts, Internet Content Creation which deals with content creation applications (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc...) and Office Productivity which is more general usage oriented (Word, Excel, Netscape, Anti-Virus, etc...).

The 2002 update changes things around a bit; first of all the benchmark's total scores are arrived at differently than in the 2001 benchmark. Windows Media Encoder no longer accounts for close to half of the Internet Content Creation test, rather only about 10%. There is also no need for a special Athlon XP SSE patch as the 2002 suite uses a version of the encoding dll that properly detects SSE support on all Palomino cores as well as Pentium 4 cores.

The rest of the benchmark is much more evenly distributed and it is much more memory bandwidth intensive than the old benchmark. The Internet Content Creation tests on average use about 600MB/s of bandwidth vs 300MB in SYSMark 2001. The Office Productivity tests are still stuck at around 580MB/s of memory bandwidth.

For more information on the tests and the applications used consult this whitepaper provided by BAPCo.

Internet Content Creation Performance Internet Content Creation SYSMark 2002 VIA P4X333 (533/DDR333) Intel 850E (533/PC1066) Intel 850E (533/PC800) VIA P4X333 (533/DDR266) Intel 845G (533/DDR333) Intel 845G (533/DDR266) Intel 845E (533/DDR266) SiS 645 (533/DDR333) SiS 645 (533/DDR266) 333 331 331 325 314 306 300 298 291 | 0 | 67 | 133 | 200 | 266 | 333 | 400

Initially we have the 845G hot on the heels of the P4X333, in this case coming within 3% of the recently announced VIA chipset.

General Usage Performance Office Productivity SYSMark 2002 Intel 850E (533/PC1066) Intel 850E (533/PC800) VIA P4X333 (533/DDR333) Intel 845G (533/DDR333) VIA P4X333 (533/DDR266) Intel 845G (533/DDR266) SiS 645 (533/DDR333) Intel 845E (533/DDR266) SiS 645 (533/DDR266) 181 179 173 171 166 163 154 149 147 | 0 | 36 | 72 | 109 | 145 | 181 | 217

Here the performance gap between the two chipsets is reduced even further; less than 2% separates the P4X333 from the 845G.