Benchmarks III
The flybys from UT2003's excellent demo. Build 2206.
Did you expect anything different ?
Quake III wraps it up.
There's little more to say.
Performance conclusion
It's difficult to pinpoint why this Springdale is comfortably faster than its Canterwood brother. This goes against everything Intel's specifications tell us. The why is difficult to ascertain, but the how is fairly simple. This Springdale simply has more usable memory bandwidth than ASUS' own Canterwood board. That's doubly surprising considering just how good the ASUS P4C800D is when compared to other Canterwood-based motherboards. Intel's much-acclaimed PAT (Performance Acceleration Technology), seemingly present only on the Canterwood, would be one explanation as to why this Springdale is faster. Intel steadfastly state that the Springdale isn't a recipient of the PAT medicine; the benchmarks seem to indicate that something good is going on between the RAM, MCH, and CPU.
It's wholly illogical to think that the Springdale is faster than a well-tuned Canterwood, even though our benchmarks graphically illustrate this to be the case. The P4P800's SPD settings seem to work wonders for default performance. If other Springdale boards match this P4P800's performance, there will be little need for the Canterwood. We really need to get down to the bottom of the P4P800's superlative performance before we can affirm that each and every Springdale is a performance behemoth. As it stands, this is the fastest S478 board we've ever seen.
