SOLANO Preview - Once Intel Makes Sense ...

The Test Platform

Before you get too enthusiastic about the benchmark results I have to let you know that our platform is not the final product. We received our i815-motherboard from a company that does not want to be named, as you can imagine. This motherboard came with Socket370, 3 DIMM slots, 1 AGP slot, 5 PCI slots and one AMR slot. The board was using the new 'ICH2' chip as 'south bridge', giving us two USB-hubs or four USB-ports, but ATA100 was not enabled. The chipset stepping of this motherboard was 'A1'. All steppings with 'A' in it are pre-production or beta samples, which normally don't come with all the performance features enabled. Therefore I suggest that the final i815 will perform better. However, the performance as well as the stability of our test platform was already very good. Equipped with new Intel INF-files we could install Windows98 without a problem and the board never failed even once.

Here you can see the Win98 system manager with all the funky i815 devices.

Due to time constraints we decided against testing of the integrated 3D graphic of i815. Firstly the drivers are early stage, secondly nobody expects great performance and finally only minorities of you will even consider using it. We will supply you with test results of i815's integrated 3D-solution at a later stage.

We ran the tests in the same configuration as we used for 'The Giga Battle - Part 2 '. This way we were able to compare our i815 results with the scores of BX, i820, i840 and VIA Apollo Pro 133A without having to re-run the whole batch of benchmarks. Therefore we used the driver release 5.08 for the GeForce graphics card. I still checked if there's a significant difference to the scores under the latest rev. 5.22 drivers and could only find that the Q3-results dropped from 5.08 to 5.22. Anyway, there are no reasons to worry about the test setup that we used for our i815 testing.

Office Application Performance Under Windows98SE

From the Giga Battle or the Showdown at 133 MHz FSB you might remember the astonishing performance that BX133 is able to produce in Sysmark2000. Pre-release Solano is already able to leave everything except of BX133 and i840 w/Pc800 RDRAM behind it. You can see that i820 has already lost and I wouldn't be surprised if i815 would smoke i840 as well once it is in full operation mode.