VIA's P4X266: The Pentium 4 gets DDR

Office Application & Content Creation Performance

SYSMark 2001 has always been much more of a memory bandwidth intensive test than Winstone 2001 which is part of the reason why the Pentium 4 does so well under it. 

SYSMark's Internet Contention Creation test is very taxing on a memory subsystem.  A large part of the test score is computed from a run of Microsoft's Windows Media Encoder while performing other tasks alongside it.  In spite of this, the 850 holds only a 2% performance advantage over the P4X266.  At the same time, the i845 falls behind by only 8%.  Indicating that this benchmark isn't as memory bandwidth intensive as we once thought; it's the Pentium 4 itself that paves the way for the high performance, not its memory bus.

The Office Productivity suite in SYSMark 2001 shows a larger gap between the 850 and the P4X266, however performance gap is still below 5%.  The 850 only has a 7% advantage over the i845 too.

What this translates into overall system performance is that the i850 is about 4% faster than the P4X266 which itself is about 4% faster than the i845.  We have yet to see the 850's 40 - 50% memory bandwidth advantage show its face.

One of Intel's most favorite tests to show off what the Pentium 4 and the i850 could do was SYSMark's Windows Media Encoder benchmark.  This test was thought to be biased in favor of Intel because of its memory bandwidth dependency.  In order to put that theory to test, we dusted off yet another benchmark and put it to good use.

Although the i850 does hold a 6% performance advantage, it's not nearly as high as we expected it to be.  It looks like that Windows Media Encoder isn't necessarily a bandwidth intensive benchmark, but took great advantage of the Pentium 4's low latency serial optimized architecture.