SYSmark 2000 - Windows 2000 Professional
In BAPCo's SYSmark 2000 suite the Intel workstation board is a bit faster when running one processor. But it easily beats the two VIA-based platforms as soon as it's equipped with two CPUs. I guess that the reason is the special bus between Intel's 82840 and the ICH chip, which is able to transport up to 266 MByte/s. The VIA chipset uses the PCI bus to connect North and South Bridge. As the data load is much higher with two CPUs, this difference seems to be the first real advantage of Intel's high performance interconnect.
This effect becomes more evident if a second task is present. Unfortunately, I had to use WinDVD 2.1, which does not seem to be suitable at all for such tests. I suggest that the DVD player always consumes a certain CPU time. Usually, the benchmark results for the dual CPU runs have to be much better than the result I got.
3D Studio Max Rendering Performance
This graphic shows the time which the system needed to render the scene dolphins.max. I had the file rendered at a resolution of 1024x768. It is impressive to see that this task is completed in almost half the time once two CPUs are used.
