Benchmarks I
Routing 2 sets of DDR signals to the Northbridge is an inherently difficult business. That's why we haven't seen dual-DDR make an appearance earlier. The number of Northbridge pins has gone up to an astonishing 1005. Anyway, let's see how all of this translates into unbuffered bandwidth using SiSoft SANDRA's benchmark.
Whilst doing better than any other DDR chipset, the benchmark scores don't make us jump with unbridled excitement. For those that prefer to see buffered benchmarks, here's how it performs:
SANDRA benchmarks are one thing, how does it affect real-world performance ?.
Pifast, a simple program that calculates the constant Pi to x million places, requires oodles of bandwidth and efficient timings to produce decent results. Setting it to calculate it to 10-million places using the fastest method, here's what we found:
Comfortably beating out the other DDR chipsets, as expected, it trails the seemingly omnipotent PC1066 RAMBUS by around 2%. Pretty good for a first attempt at a new chipset thus far.
