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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: PCI Express for Graphics Test Platforms Sysmark2004 Overview Sysmark2004 Take 2 3D Rendering Cinebench 2003 Gaming Performnance The Final Analysis Give Us Some Feedback to Help Us Improve our Reviews
Intel LGA775 SocketT Part 2 System Performance
(Review by MS, August 16, 2004)

Conclusions

In this second installment of the Intel 925 platform we have looked at a variety of real life applications and surprisingly, the newbie platform took most of the benchmarks in a tour de force. One aspect worth mentioning here is that the data were obtained without the aid of native command queuing since everything was run on the very same hard disk, that is, the Maxtor Diamond Max Plus9 SATA 150 which does not support NCQ.

Of course, this opens the same old question that has plagued the review community over and again, namely, which one is valid, running everything on the same hardware or else using the stuff that works best with each platform. The latter is probably the more accurate way to do justice to any given product but on the other hand, there is just too much way for interpretation in that case to be practical.

Back to the current results. Gaming applications were the only soft point in the new platform and at this point it is not clear whether this is an issue with DDR2 or with PCI express. Suffice it to say that the weight in all gaming benchmarks was primarily on the system rather than on the graphics card, especially in Unreal Tournament Botmatch and Comanche4 and, therefore the bottleneck appears to be more on the CPU and memory side. We are still far from a definite answer, though.

With respect to the other applications, we also have to consider that the 3.6 GHz Prescott CPU is the fastest P4 processor currently announced, even though it is not available in the channel. In other words, some of the numbers that we were looking at are a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy since there is no equivalent Socket 478 CPU. On the other hand, the benchmark results are there and, paper-launch or not, the P4 3.6E is overall probably the fastest CPU out there.

On a clock for clock comparison, the situation is somewhat different. In order to shed a bit more light on the results, we took the Extreme Edition scores for both the 875 and the 925 platforms and plotted the difference in performance for all applications we looked at. The difference is plotted in absolute values, that is, e.g. 0.02 means a 2% difference and so on. To make it easier, we colored the cases where the 925 was slower than the 875 in red, vice versa, when the 925 was faster, the delta is shown in blue.

     

     

Leaving out the clock advantage, the tables are turning and the 875 platform looks quite a bit more appealing. Bottomline here appears the fact that DDR2 seems ok for office tasks but the new platform has some real weaknesses in gaming applications and in this case we are not even talking about the overall positioning compared to AMD but only a clock for clock face-off.

Surprisingly, in most applications we looked at, there was hardly any impact of latencies on the performance of the system. Does that mean that all of a sudden latencies don’t matter anymore? Quite honestly, this does not seem to be true, however, Intel has succeeded to cover latencies through a very sophisticated prefetch system integrated in the 925 chipset. A different way to look at things is of course to say that the IPC of the processor is so low that latencies won’t matter. It is all a question of the viewing angle but the performance of the new platform speaks for itself.

As mentioned, we have not covered the probably most important aspect of the new platform yet, which is the ICH6 with its native command queuing capabilities. We will have an in-depth coverage of the impact of NCQ shortly, though.

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