SiS 648 - Taking Advantage of the P4 Situation

Content Creation & General Usage Performance

SYSMark has become a solid measurement of overall system performance since its induction into our benchmarking suite. Although the Internet Content Creation suite caters to more of a niche market, the Office Productivity tests are a perfect measurement of overall system performance in the applications all of us use on a daily basis.

The applications benchmarked include:

For more information on the methodology and exactly what SYSMark does to generate these performance scores check out BAPCo's SYSMark 2002 Whitepaper.

The P4X400 would not complete either of the SYSMark tests without consistently failing the suite due to timing errors; we're not sure if this is an issue with VIA or the benchmark although we have seen similar issues on other chipsets.

Content Creation Performance Internet Content Creation SYSMark 2002 Intel 850E (PC1066) SiS 648 (DDR400) SiS 648 (DDR333) VIA P4X333 (DDR333) SiS 645DX (DDR333) Intel 845E (DDR266) 317 314 312 309 307 299 | 0 | 63 | 127 | 190 | 254 | 317 | 380

The performance spread between the fastest 850E chipset and the slowest 845E solution is less than 10% meaning that the performance difference between these solutions is negligible. Because of the already small differences between the chipsets it's no surprise that the performance boost from moving to DDR400 isn't significant. It should be noted that we're comparing DDR333 with a CAS latency of 2.5 to DDR400 with a CAS latency of 2.5 as well, if we had used CAS2 DDR333 then the benchmark could have been tilted in favor of DDR333 as well.

This is testament to the fact that DDR400 won't be ready for prime time until much later this year or into 2003; right now chipset manufacturers are more concerned with optimizing DDR333 performance than tuning their solutions for DDR400.

General Usage Performance Office Productivity SYSMark 2002 Intel 850E (PC1066) SiS 648 (DDR400) SiS 648 (DDR333) VIA P4X333 (DDR333) SiS 645DX (DDR333) Intel 845E (DDR266) 175 175 172 170 169 158 | 0 | 35 | 70 | 105 | 140 | 175 | 210

There's a much larger performance spread in the Office Productivity suite, which is arguably more important than the Internet Content Creation results for the vast majority of users.

The SiS 648 is able to jump on the heels of Intel's 850E solution and even equal its performance with DDR400. Although not pictured here, the 845G with DDR333 offers performance in between the P4X333 and the SiS 648 solutions.