VIA's P4X333 - If they only had a License

Internet Content Creation & General Usage Performance

With this review we continue to use SYSMark 2002; SYSMark 2002 can be considered to be a much more memory bandwidth intensive version of the Winstone tests. The benchmark is split into two parts, Internet Content Creation which deals with content creation applications (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc...) and Office Productivity which is more general usage oriented (Word, Excel, Netscape, Anti-Virus, etc...).

The 2002 update changes things around a bit; first of all the benchmark's total scores are arrived at differently than in the 2001 benchmark. Windows Media Encoder no longer accounts for close to half of the Internet Content Creation test, rather only about 10%. There is also no need for a special Athlon XP SSE patch as the 2002 suite uses a version of the encoding dll that properly detects SSE support on all Palomino cores as well as Pentium 4 cores.

The rest of the benchmark is much more evenly distributed and it is much more memory bandwidth intensive than the old benchmark. The Internet Content Creation tests on average use about 600MB/s of bandwidth vs 300MB in SYSMark 2001. The Office Productivity tests are still stuck at around 580MB/s of memory bandwidth.

For more information on the tests and the applications used consult this whitepaper provided by BAPCo.

Internet Content Creation Performance Internet Content Creation SYSMark 2002 VIA P4X333 (533/DDR333) Intel 850/E (533/PC1066) Intel 850/E (533/PC800) VIA P4X333 (533/DDR266) Intel 845 (533/DDR266) SiS 645 (533/DDR333) SiS 645 (533/DDR266) 333 331 331 325 300 298 291 | 0 | 67 | 133 | 200 | 266 | 333 | 400

Right off the bat we prove that the ICC portion of SYSMark 2002 isn't a Rambus-geared test as the P4X333 is able to provide more than enough memory bandwidth to offer performance that's virtually equal to Intel's 850E with PC1066 RDRAM. Keep in mind that DDR333 only offers 2.7GB/s of memory bandwidth vs. the 4.2GB/s of bandwidth offered by the 850E's dual channel PC1066 configuration.

Even with DDR266 the P4X333 is faster than both the Intel 845 and the SiS 645 chipsets.

General Usage Performance Office Productivity SYSMark 2002 Intel 850/E (533/PC1066) Intel 850/E (533/PC800) VIA P4X333 (533/DDR333) VIA P4X333 (533/DDR266) SiS 645 (533/DDR333) Intel 845 (533/DDR266) SiS 645 (533/DDR266) 181 179 173 166 154 149 147 | 0 | 36 | 72 | 109 | 145 | 181 | 217

Although the P4X333 loses its top running spot in the graph above, the performance difference between it and the 850E is negligible (< 10%). You would be hard pressed to find any performance differences between the 850E and P4X333; the same cannot be said about the Intel 845 and SiS 645 chipsets which both bring up the rear and are at least 10% slower than the fastest P4X333 configuration.