Micron's Upcoming Samurai DDR Chipset - First Looks

Benchmark Results

Given the short amount of time I had with the board I tried to hit both Business Application performance and 3D gaming performance. For the business side of the testing I ran BAPCO's SYSMark98 under both Windows 98SE and Windows NT 4.0 SP6. To touch on the DDR platforms 3D gaming performance I ran the retail version of Quake 3 Arena and also Expendable. The game apps were run at 640x480x16 to eliminate the possibility of the graphics board becoming the bottleneck. For comparison's I included results from a 440BX, i820, and i840 platform. The 440BX platform was tested with a Coppermine 700 CPU overclocked to 750 MHz, while the rest used a 733 MHz part.

Business Application Performance Under Windows 98SE

Looks like the Micron motherboard is able to hold its own against the fastest scoring i840.

Business Application Performance Under Windows NT 4.0 SP6

The SYSmark98 results here look very similar to those under Windows 98SE. Both the i840 and Samurai DDR chipsets pull further ahead of the i820 board.