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In the Forums... |
Posted: May 20th, 2002 Written by: Tuan Huynh Hardware Setup Intel Pentium 4 2.53 GHz, Intel Desktop Board Brookdale-G, Intel Desktop Board D850EBG, 2x 256MB Corsair XMS2700,  4x 128MB PC800 Rambus, ATI Radeon 8500, ATI Radeon 7500, Gigabyte MAYA7500 Pro, 3D Power Morpheus MX400 Pro, MSI Starforce Ti200, Intel Extreme Graphics, D Link DFE530TX+, Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 20GB, Allied 400Watt AMD approved PSU, Lite On 52x CD-RW, Software Setup Windows XP Professional w/All updates, Intel Application Accelerator 2.1, Intel Chipset INF, Sound Max w/SPX, Sysmark 2002, Internet Content Creation, Office Productivity, SiSoft Sandra, CPU Arithmetic, Memory Bandwidth, PC Mark 2002, DVD Playback CPU Utilization, 3D Mark 2001SE, Default Benchmark, Vertex Shader Performance, Quake 3 Arena Demo Four, 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, Return to Castle Wolfenstein ATDemo8, 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, Test Setup Summary For benchmarking purposes, I mainly used the i845G board with onboard graphics enabled. When comparing 3D Performance, I stuck in a variety of “mainstream/sub $100” cards with the exception for the Ti200, which is around $130 lowest online. As a basis of comparison, I used the Intel i850E board with PC800 Rambus, as PC1066 Rambus is not available yet. As for the software setup, I used the same setup as always, same software, same drivers, same benchmarks, etc... The Test  Sysmark 2002 Internet Content Creation has always relied mainly on memory bandwidth for performing operations in Adobe Premiere, Adobe Photoshop, etc… Here we see the i845G with onboard graphics enabled fall behind by only 7% when compared to the i850E with PC800. Since the difference is less then 10%, users won’t really know the difference. When you disable the integrated graphics and throw in an AGP card, the i845G is nearly able to outperform the i850E. Compared to using onboard graphics, adding in an AGP card will give you a 6% performance boost on the i845G, as there the chipset no longer needs to share the memory bandwidth for the frame buffer. With the performance gaps between the i845G, i845G with an AGP card, and the i850E being less then 10% apart, it shows that Intel has been working on perfecting SMA (Shared Memory architecture).  When it comes to Sysmark 2002 Office Productivity, there’s essentially no performance loss when using the onboard graphics. Since the i845G is mainly aimed towards OEM system buyers, Corporations, and Offices, having little to no performance sacrifice when running office applications with the integrated graphics is a must. Compared to the i850E with PC800, we again see that the performance difference is still less then 10%, which is nearly unnoticeable.  When it comes to synthetic benchmarks such as SiSoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic benchmark, we see that the FPU performance is virtually the same on all platforms. As for ALU performance, the i845G with an AGP card comes out on top beating out the i850E 4% and the i845G by 12%. Since this is a synthetic benchmark, we’ll just have to see if it affects the performance in games and applications as much.  When it comes to Sandra’s memory bandwidth benchmark, the i845G suffers badly with SMA. Compared to having the onboard graphics disabled, the i845G’s FPU bandwidth falls behind 51%, and 19% in terms of ALU. With an AGP card, the i845G still falls behind the i850E by 26%, which makes a lot of sense since DDR theoretically isn’t able to achieve Rambus’s massive memory bandwidth. |
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