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

Office Applications In Detail, Continued

Of all Office application benchmarks this might be the one Intel and Rambus likes best. The high scores of i840 as well as i820 with PC800 RDRAM show how well RDRAM can do. However, it takes PC800 RDRAM and no less. PC700 and PC600 RDRAM score worse than i820 with PC100 SDRAM and the MTH. Apollo Pro 133A does not look great in this test and even BX133 is not scoring well either.

This benchmark shows how different a software application benchmark can look. Intel used Naturally Speaking in its own 'Application Launcher' benchmark, where it depended heavily on memory bandwidth. The results here show the opposite. BX133 is leading the pack and then VIA's Apollo Pro 133A comes second. Intel's 840 chipset looks pretty pathetic and i820 'Caminogate' is even further behind. What conclusion does that lead to? Naturally Speaking does not like RDRAM?

Netscape Communicator again prefers BX133, something we will see a lot more often as we look through the results. i840 is at least scoring second, but i820 with only one Rambus-channel looks pretty bad indeed. VIA's Apollo Pro 133A is clearly better.