ServerWorks HEsl: DDR bandwidth without DDR SDRAM

Dual Processor Inspection Tests

The Dual Processor Inspection Tests are actually a part of eTesting Labs' (formerly ZDBOP) High-End Winstone 99. The benchmark runs through multiprocessor versions of Bentley's Microstation SE (CAD/modeling software), Adobe's Photoshop 4.0 and Microsoft's Visual C++ 5.0. The overall score is produced which you can see compared below as well as individual performance scores in each of the three benchmark categories.

It's not too surprising that the numbers all pretty much fall in line with one another since we are using the same amount of memory and equally clocked CPUs on all four systems. The biggest performance difference here is no more than 3% between the highest performing solution, the HEsl and the lowest performing contender, the 133A.

The HEsl continues to hold the lead over the competition however the lead isn't spectacular at all. If you'll remember from our review of the Apollo Pro 266 chipset, the Pentium III is not a very memory bandwidth hungry processor at all and although the added memory bandwidth is definitely more useful with two processors the fact of the matter is that a doubling of memory bandwidth isn't going to be able to do much for the Pentium III.

Looking at the individual components of the Dual Processor Inspection Tests, the Microstation SE benchmark shows very little variation among the processors here. Microstation and many CAD/modeling packages don't really benefit all that much from having dual processors, especially when talking about the Pentium III. In fact a single 1GHz Athlon would be faster than any of these dual 733MHz Pentium III systems.