Intel P45: The New Chipset Lacks Progress

Application Benchmarks

A performance difference of two seconds when scanning files for viruses is not really worth mentioning.

Again, we see only two seconds’ difference for a rendering workload using Cinema 4D release 10. The interesting part is that we could not find particular performance benefits for X48 or P45 at 1600 MHz bus settings.

Fritz scales beautifully with an increasing number of processing cores. However, all of the code can be executed in the L2 cache, which is why FSB and memory performance are of little relevance.

This is the first performance difference we consider worth mentioning: creating a large PDF file was a few seconds quicker on the P45 system running 1600 MHz bus speeds than on the other Intel chipsets.

There is almost no performance difference in Photoshop CS3.

Play it again: transcoding HDTV video to Windows Media Video 9 format does not speed up much on P45 or the higher 1600 MHz bus settings.

WinRAR has to move lots of data into and out of the main memory, so it is memory and FSB sensitive. In our benchmark, the platforms set at 1600 MHz provide a few percent better performance than chipsets running at 1333 MHz. Remember that the core clock speed of 3.0 GHz remained the same during all the tests.