Benchmarks I
It's unfortunate that the board doesn't respond well to manual timings at 200FSB. Setting SPD timings gives higher benchmarking results, so that's what we go with. However, the BIOS seems to assert relatively high latencies when setting to SPD; strange. We'll look at how it performs in our synthetic memory benchmarking test with SiSoft's SANDRA's unbuffered memory benchmark.
Immediately we see that bandwidth is a little lower than expected. Setting 2-6-2-2 timings gives us a ~ 2350 MB/s figure for this integer-based benchmark. Memory bandwidth is usually a reasonable predictor of benchmarking performance. Let's see if our assertion is held true as we look at the very memory-dependant Pifast.
It seems so. We should note at this juncture that the Asus Springdale board seems to have a phenomenal SPD setting, such that it even eclipses the Canterwood's benchmarks. The MSI Springdale, on the other hand, doesn't appear to fare so well. Still, it's faster than the i845PE 200FSB single-channel motherboard.
Looking at the boards' ability to crunch WAV files into MP3 format. Also, again do bear in mind that the MSI board is running the 3.0C around 15MHz slower than the comparative Asus boards.
No great shakes here.
SETI should be able to sort the runners out. A long benchmark that loves memory bandwidth and low latencies. Running a typical 0.417 Work Unit. Time is quoted in hours, minutes, and seconds.
It's all about usable bandwidth with these dual-channel chipsets, really.
