Benchmarks I
Sisoft Sandra 2003.We start our tests with a purely theoretical set of performance benchmarks using Sisoft Sandra 2003. We ran the benchmarks using Sandra’s default setting and have compared the results of both the CPU and Multi-Media tests below.
We were very disappointed to find that the XP3000+ at stock speed did not keep up with either the Pentium 4 or XP2800. We were so surprised that we actually re-ran the Sandra tests on another NFII motherboard with a clean windows XP installation. Sadly the results were the same. This either means that the XP3000+ does not warrant its name, or that the Sandra tests do not utilise the additional L2 cache for some reason. The latter would seem more likely at this stage because when the XP3000+ is run at the same speed as the XP2800 the Sandra results are almost identical.
In comparison with the P4 3.06 the XP3000+ was well behind in all but one test!
Worrying as these results are, we should remember that this is a theoretical test and does not necessarily reflect real life performance. To build a full picture we need to see how the XP3000+ performs across a range of tests, so let’s continue…
