Benchmarks II
There had been some criticism regarding SiS' AGP drivers on the launch of their initial Pentium 4 DDR offering, the SiS645. Having used the SR7-8X for a few days, I found no signs of instability at 133MHz FSB and 166MHz memory settings. Performance, as you're about to see, was pretty good.
I'll start off with 3DMark 2001SE. Put simply, it gives you a final score based on the running of 7 individual tests. The greater the performance, the greater the score. Benchmarked at its native resolution of 1024x768x32, a resolution that is still quite heavily relies upon a decent interaction between CPU, memory, and AGP.
I'm a little disappointed in the result when using DDR-400 memory. The narrow lead can be attributed to the slightly more relaxed timings used to benchmark at this memory speed. I'm sure that if I had been able to use aggressive timings, the score would have been at least another 100 marks greater. Remember, I'm using a stock-clocked GeForce4 Ti 4400 (275/550) and a Pentium 4 processor at 2133MHz / 133FSB. Best image quality was used.
On to Serious Sam 2 now. Benchmarking the Valley of the Jaguar timedemo, on that is mainly subsystem limited at 1024x768x32 and Normal preferences.
There's absolutely no way that you could tell the difference between these scores on a purely visual basis. The difference is statistically insignificant, too.
How about Comanche 4, another benchmark largely limited by the subsystem when using a GeForce Ti video card. Benchmarked at 1024x768x32.
For some inexplicable reason, the SiS648-powered SR7-8X doesn't do that well against its P4 counterpart. Again, the results largely mirror each other.
On to Quake 3. I'll only run 512 fastest to show just how well each chipset is able to deliver usable bandwidth from memory to CPU.
More of the same here. The inability to use stricter memory timings at DDR-400 hinders its performance. I'm still guessing as to why the Corsair XMS3200 C2 memory that was used during testing was not able to be used with stricter timings even when extra voltage was applied, it certainly flew when used in the ABIT IT7-MAX (i845E) motherboard.
