P4 SDRAM benchmarks!

[Remnant2]

Tom's Hardware has a new article out reviewing the i845 chipset, which supports SDRAM and (disabled) DDR-SDRAM.

The bottom line is the P4 looses from 5% to 25% speed when switching from dual-channel RDRAM to single-channel PC133. This is expected, but still really sucks, especially considering that this platform combo will likely become pretty popular for P4 setups to take advantage of SDRAM's huge price advantage.

Hopefully Intel will allow the MB makers to enable DDR support shortly, because SDR is no match for the bandwidth a P4 needs.


edit: address of Tom's Hardware, in case someone doesn't know.

 

[magicslax]

The p4 is a sinking ship as far as prices go even with an sdram solution. added to the inevitable performance loss (while still remaining more expensive), heck, why would you ever go pentium 4?

 

[Noriaki]

Link

5-25% eh...wow that's pretty harsh on the top end. 25% is alot of performance to lose.

Hopefully DDR will be useable soon...and won't impact it ass badly.

 

[GameQuoter]

As soon as the i845 is released, all retailers will switch to it.

 

[Pabster]

Why is this "news" so surprising? We already know that the long pipeline and various other optimizations in the current Willamette P4 core are designed exclusively around RDRAM (mainly to hide the relatively large inherent latency of RDRAM.) Coupling it with even DDR will result in a performance loss, and obviously with PC133 we're talking a significant loss.

 

[Remnant2]

It's not surprising at all; but it is the first hard data on what we expected to happen.

Supposedly, the rumor in the industry is that Via' new DDR chipset, which will appear both for the P4 and the Athlon, is quite a bit faster than their previous try. Maybe so, and it would then be a great OEM board for the P4. My suspicion is that it still won't hold a candle to the nForce though.

 

[BFG10K]

The results were rather disappointing but not really that surprising.
I think everyone's waiting for DDR Pentium 4 motherboards.

 

[NFS4]

Been there, done that