Date: October 31st, 2004
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner, Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product was donated by: Intel
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SISOFT SANDRA 2003 PROFESSIONAL MEMORY BANDWIDTH BENCHMARK

For this benchmark, I wanted to see the advantage dual channel DDR2 memory brought to the average workstation using this particular 925X board.

With everything practically identical other than the motherboard and the CPU, over a 1Gig/sec increase was noted when using Sandra's memory write bandwidth benchmark. With a increase of that magnitude, why are we not seeing better results in the other benchmarks?

SISOFT SANDRA 2003 PROFESSIONAL FILE SYSTEM BENCHMARK

File system benchmarks in the past were always carried out on the cheapest hard drives available seeing I wanted to represent what people could expect with the slower drive variety. Now that SATA drives have come down in price so much, I planned on showing you just how much faster a SATA RAID 0 array was when comparing it to a standard IDE ATA-133 drive. With the results shown above, you can expect 2-3X the performance with the performance array.

Now this benchmark cost me about 5 hours worth of uninstalling , formatting and completely reinstalling the operating system and the drivers over and over again trying to find what I missed to cause the performance shortfall when benchmarking the same RAID 0 array I used for the other testbeds. Through four complete reinstalls I always obtained results in the 62050-62150MB/s range and could only conclude that the difference could be through the related change in the northbridge's link to the southbridge controller.

COMANCHE 4 DEMO BENCHMARK (1024X768 / 32BIT / AUDIO DISABLED)

As a good recent real world gaming benchmark, the Comanche 4 test will enable the user to see how a CPU speed increase or decrease will effect their relative frame rates in real world gaming.

BAPCO WEBMARK2004

*WebMark 2004 is an Internet technology based benchmark that accurately reflects usage patterns for business users in two Internet usage categories - Information Processing and Commercial Transactions. Each category represents the workload of a simulated user accomplishing a set of common tasks. Benchmarks designed by BAPCO are the result of a cooperative agreement between industry leading companies from a variety of disciplines ranging from publications, testing labs, PC manufacturers and semiconductor manufacturing. Bapco's depth of membership represents the breadth of the computing industry and harnesses a consortium of knowledge. (* From Bapco.com)

The increase in the processor FSB did not net any real increase with Webmark 2004 and with the margin of error taken into consideration, the results could be taken as being exactly the same when comparing to the D925XCV and the 800Mhz 3.4Ghz EE.