Intel i820 Chipset Review

Game Application Performance - PCI

Looking at the results using an AGP board really didn't show us much improvement in the i820's new 4x AGP bus. I decided to plug in a PCI based TNT2 adapter, ASUS's V3800 PCI. I was curious to see how the VIA platform would compare by removing AGP performance completely.

Now all of the PCI based gaming benchmarks really caught me off guard. It looks as though the i820 platform has a pretty descent advantage when the video is utilizing the PCI bus. With an ASUS V3800 PCI TNT2 Ultra based board installed in each of the platforms the i820 had a 3FPS advantage over the i440BX! When an AGP based video adapter was installed the i820 and i440BX almost scored identically in this same test.

Even under Quake 3 Arena the i820 had a superior score over the other platforms when a PCI based video adaptor was installed.

It clear that the PCI bus of the i820 has superior performance over the other platforms, at least with a PCI video adaptor. I thought that the VIA platform would come into the running with the PCI video board. I figured that by removing the AGP bus from the picture the VIA might get a little closer to the i820 & i440's performance. It looks as though the VIA's PCI and AGP buses are just a bit slower across the board in comparison to the i820 and i400BX chipsets.