Benchmarks I
Starting off with SiSoft SANDRA's unbuffered memory benchmark to evaluate how each chipset delivers bandwidth with no optimistations and prefetching present.
Both Intel DDR platforms bring up the rear in this benchmark that has never been that kind to them. Running DDR333 memory in the i845PE-powered MAX2 v2 gives it a healthy boost over its DDR266 counterpart.
How do they fare in Pifast. It's simply calculates the constant Pi to 10m decimal places. Effective bandwidth utilisation is important here.
The MAX2 v2 with DDR33 memory pulls up a place by narrowly squeezing past the SiS648-powered chipset. RAMBUS and the P4X400 take a decisive lead, though.
Next we'll turn our attention to MP3 encoding. We're benchmarking by encoding a 610MB custom WAV file (U2's Pop album, incidentally) into 192kb/s MP3 using the LAME 3.92 encoder and Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end.
All pretty similar here due to MP3 encoding being a largely CPU affair.
