DDR400 Kills Rambus: Shooting Star SiS 648 for P4

Benchmarks Under Windows 2000

We wanted to avoid the automatic resource management feature integrated in Windows XP, so as in the past, we opted to use Windows 2000 to test these motherboards. The only reason for choosing Windows 2000 over Windows XP is that the newer version of Windows optimizes how background applications run. This new feature would have prevented us from obtaining accurate benchmarking results.

We performed a total of 22 different benchmark tests in order to obtain the most complete, well-balanced view of how the SiS 648 chipset performs. Four different Quake 3 tests were used to determine OpenGL performance. The different MPEG-encoding benchmarks provide a comprehensive testing environment - mp3 Maker Platinum and Lame MP3 Encoder were used to encode a 178 MB WAV file into "MPEG-1 Layer 3 format." Still a classic, our MPEG-4 test converts a file from a commercial DVD-ROM into MPEG-4 format using Xmpeg 4.5 and the DivX 5.01 codec. A regular in our list of benchmarks is determining rendering performance using Cinema 4D XL version 7.303. We also ran WinACE Packer 2.11 to test how well the CPU performs when archiving files, a common application in the computing world. PC Mark 2002 is used to analyze the performance of the CPU and memory. The new SPECviewperf version 7 offers an extensive suite of 3D benchmarks. The Sysmark 2002 benchmark was used to determine office performance. DirectX 8 gaming performance was tested using 3D Mark 2001 and Comanche 4. The synthetic benchmark SiSoft Sandra Pro 2002 was also used.