ScienceMark 2.0 and Pifast
Our benchmarking look at the PT880 starts off with ScienceMark 2.0 analysis.
A brief recap here. Dual-channel running with DDR400 RAM affords up to 6.4GB/s of memory bandwidth. Similarly, for the Athlon 64 single-channel running is limited to 3.2GB/s. We see the four Intel DC-based boards top out at around 65% efficiency. VIA has made claims that its memory controller, via the use of DualStream64 memory controller technology, is as about as good as it gets on a S478 platform. It does have the highest bandwidth rating, according to ScienceMark 2.0.
It looks good on the latency front, too. All boards were set to manual 2-6-2-2 latencies in BIOS. VIA will probably attribute this to its improved memory branch predictions and tighter read/write turn-around for improved clock timings, to quote the PR guff. Seems good so far.
Pifast, the resident constant calculator to 10m places, likes a bit of both, that is, bandwidth and low latencies. This result seems to contradict the ScienceMark findings to a small degree. We had hoped for a sub-60s time, thereby eclipsing the tuned Canterwood's best time of 60.95s. It's faster than a regular Springdale PE, though.
