VIA's P4X266: The Pentium 4 gets DDR

Business & Content Creation Performance

As usual, we'll start off with an analysis of performance under Winstone 2001. 

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that you don't need 3.2GB/s or even 1.6GB/s of memory bandwidth to run Word and Excel.  Remember that the fastest your hard drive can transfer data rarely exceeds 40MB/s for most IDE hard drives, and Business Winstone 2001 (like most of our daily computer usage) is heavily disk limited. 

The i850 and the P4X266 offer virtually identical performance here, which is a huge win for the Pentium 4.  It means that the cheaper P4X266 platform can be used in businesses without worry of a loss in performance. 

In spite of the heavily disk bound tests, the i845 is still about 13% slower than both of the higher bandwidth platforms; definitely not worth it.

Things don't change much under Content Creation Winstone 2001 either.  The i850 and P4X266 offer similar performance while the i845 falls behind by around 10%.