Showdown at 133 MHz FSB - Part 2, The Real McCoy

Office Application Benchmark BAPCo Sysmark 2000

I guess the biggest surprise hidden in those results is obviously the highest score achieved by the platform with the 440BX-chipset. The oldest chipset with the 'old' SDRAM scores even better than Intel's great 840-chipset. The low latency of SDRAM plus the low overhead of BX produces better results than i840 with 3.2 GB/s data bandwidth, but high RDRAM-latency. VIA's Apollo Pro 133A is far behind BX, but it's on par with i820 using PC800 RDRAM. Once i820 is using PC700, PC600 or SDRAM with the MTH it is the slowest chipset in the comparison!!

Office Applications In Detail

Bryce 4 is a 3D modeling and rendering software. You can see that i840 scores even less than Apollo Pro 133A and way worse than BX133, because it depends much more on low latency supplied by SDRAM than the high memory bandwidth supplied by RDRAM. This is the first benchmark in this test that does NOT like RDRAM.