ATi RADEON XPRESS 200 Series: AMD Platform Chipsets

Name: ATi RADEON XPRESS 200 Series: AMD Platform Chipsets - Page 5
Brand: ATi

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, November 08, 2004, 05:00 AM EDT

For our next round of synthetic benchmarks, we ran the CPU and Memory performance modules built into Futuremark's PCMark04. For those interested in more than just the graphs, we've got a couple of quotes directly from Futuremark that explain exactly what these tests do and how they work.

Futuremark PCMark04

More Synthetic CPU and Memory Benchmarks

"The CPU test suite is a collection of tests that are run to isolate the performance of the CPU. There are nine tests in all. Two pairs of tests are run multithreaded - each test in the pair is run in its own thread. The remaining five tests are run single threaded. These tests include such functions as file encryption, decryption, compression and decompression, grammar check, audio conversion, WMV and DivX video compression."

"The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing."

Whether or not the IGP is used, the RADEON XPRESS 200 fares very well against a similar configured nForce 3 Ultra based system. PCMark04's CPU performance module showed all four of the AMD powered systems performing within a fraction of one another. As we saw in the SANDRA test, there was some variation on the memory performance module. With a discreet graphics card installed, the RADEON XPRESS 200 fell just shy of the nForce 3 based systems, but when using the IGP it fell about 150 points behind.

Tags: AMD, ATI, Radeon, Chipset, Pre, Chip, Platform, XP, chips, 200 series, ATI Radeon, IPS, chipsets, IE, PLA, IP, AM

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com