ServerWorks HEsl: DDR bandwidth without DDR SDRAM

The Competition

In order to provide for a good comparison we picked a total of three competing dual processor platforms to pit the Thunder HEsl against.

The OR840 from Intel, which makes use of the Intel 840 chipset.

Click to Enlarge

The MSI 694D Pro using the Apollo Pro 133A chipset. This is the same board we used in our original VIA Apollo Pro 133A with Dual Processors Review.

Click to Enlarge

And finally we have an engineering sample of the first dual processor board based on the VIA Apollo Pro 266 chipset: Iwill's DVD266-R.

Click to Enlarge

Since the DVD266-R was in early beta, there were issues with the fourth DIMM slot working reliably. So in order to obtain a 512MB memory configuration to match the rest of the contenders we used Mushkin's latest 256MB PC2100 DDR modules which worked perfectly at PC2100 CAS2.

Click to Enlarge

Since the two processors in a SMP system will be competing for the same FSB and memory bandwidth, the more memory bandwidth a platform has, the less of a bottleneck that will be for the CPUs and the more efficient (in theory) the SMP setup will be. It's time to find out if that holds true.