Intel 845 Chipset Review & Motherboard Roundup: September 2001

Intel's Application Accelerator

Alongside the 845 chipset, Intel is also releasing their Application Accelerator software.  We brought you a quick look at this software from Computex with a promise to take a look at the software itself as soon as we returned to the lab.  Unfortunately, the copy we got our hands on showed virtually no performance improvement whether it was turned on or off, confirming our suspicions that the software was nothing more than glorified IDE drivers from Intel.  We gave Intel the benefit of the doubt and waited until we saw a final release before passing judgment on the software. 

When we first brought you Intel's claims of the performance improvements offered by their Application Accelerator software (10% in most cases) we hypothesized that the increase was when compared to Microsoft's default IDE drivers under Windows 2000.  This was indeed the case, and when compared to performance with Intel's storage/IDE drivers installed, the performance difference dropped to less than a percent.  The application accelerator software did reduce boot times by around 5 – 10% under Windows 2000, but not the 50% claimed by Intel (because they were comparing to Microsoft's default IDE drivers).  So is the application accelerator anything more than glorified IDE drivers?  Yes and no.

The application accelerator software takes the place of Intel's previous storage/IDE drivers but it goes beyond simply providing driver support.  Intel has built in software prefetch mechanisms into the application accelerator that look at data access patterns and prefetch frequently accessed data into main memory to improve performance.  Since this is an IDE device driver, it only improves performance on IDE drives and even then the performance improvements can't be noticed under most conventional benchmarks.  But tasks such as loading a level in Quake III Arena or unzipping a file in WinZip are sped up by a decent amount. 

Intel's application accelerator can be downloaded here and is free of charge.  It works with Windows 9x/Me and NT/2000/XP, although the performance improvements under XP are not as pronounced yet because of a lack of optimizations for the OS in the current driver.  The application accelerator will work with any Intel 8xx chipset (for example, the 815, 845, 850, 860 but not the BX) and any CPU used with that chipset.