Performance

Overall the performance of the K7V is more than satisfactory. In business applications using 128 MB system RAM it still doesn’t reach up to the high scores set by the MSI K7Pro. However, in a 128 MB system memory configuration, the HDD I/O times are the crucial performance limitation parameters, at least in ContentCreation Winstone2000. Therefore it is not surprising that regardless of whether HSDRAM or VCM was used in either 3:3 or 4:3 setting, the results were statistically indistinguishable from each other.

This changes quite a bit as soon as the system RAM is increased to 256 MB. In addition, overclocking the bus speed shows the impact of the memory configuration on the performance in a multitasking environment.

ContentCreation Winstone 2000 scores depending on clock speed and memory configuration. The lower 4 columns show the scores at 800 MHz using 128 MB of either VCM (V) or HSDRAM (H) at 3:3 and 4:3 bus frequency. All other results shown were obtained using 256 MB system memory to reduce HDD performance issues. The numbers indicate the clockspeed at which the data were obtained (mean of 3 runs).

What appears to be counterintuitive is the fact that increasing the latency in form of the DRAM read latch time increases the performance. However, this is not as much a conundrum as it appears at first glance. In most high performance systems, memory performance is no longer limited by the data transfer capability of the Bus itself but rather by the ratio of page hit to page miss. The latter increases with the bus / memory frequency and the amount of memory / number of applications. Page thrashing can be held responsible, particularly in 3D applications but also the overall speed of the memory bus plays a role. In other words, by increasing the latency of the DRAM read latch, the system gets more time to correctly place the data out (DIMM) into the data valid window (chipset), thus reducing the read errors. In business applications the performance gain is negligible since most processing is handled from the cache anyway but what about 3D performance?

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