Pentium 4 Bench Test


The Pentium 4 Bench Test - Page 2

The Pentium 4 Bench Test 
Architecture and Performance Charting Of Intel's New Flagship

By Dave Altavilla - November 20, 2000
 

Intel was kind enough to send us a complete Pentium 4 system for testing and evaluation.  This system included a Pentium 4 1.5GHz. Processor, 256MB of RAMBUS DRAM and the Intel D850GB i850 Motherboard, among other things.

 
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RAMBUS, as of late has almost been a four letter word.  However, as it is well known, Intel has all but bet the farm on the support of this highly controversial memory subsystem.  This time around Intel is utilizing RAMBUS with 2X the bandwidth found on their i820 implementation.  The i850 chipset that supports the Pentium 4 also utilizes a Dual Channel RAMBUS DRAM architecture for 3.2GB/sec. of bandwidth.  That folks, is one fat pipe for data to the processor.

Specifications Of The Pentium 4 Test Platform
A beefed up memory subsystem and System Bus along with all the creature comforts


The D850GB Motherboard that came with system has the following features.

 

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  • Support for Intel Pentium 4 Processor

  • 400MHz. system data bus

  • Two Direct RDRAM channels with two RIMMs per channel (four sockets)

  • Up to 2GB of PC600 or PC800 RDRAM system memory

  • i850 chipset

    • Intel 8250 Memory Controller Hub

    • Intel 82801BA I/O Controller Hub

    • Intel 82802AB 4Mb Firmware Hub

    • SMSC LPC47M102 LPC Bus I/O Controller

    • One AGP 4X Slot AGP Pro50 (50 W max)

    • Five PCI Slots

    • One CNR slot shared with PCI

    • Integrated AC97 Audio with AD1881 Codec

    • Four USB Ports, 1 serial, 1 parallel, PS2 keyboard and mouse

    • Two Ultra DMA ATA-33/66/100 IDE Interfaces

    • One Floppy Driver Interface

    • Four three pin sensing fan headers

    • 12" X 9.6" ATX Form Factor

 

Click images for full view

     

 

 

 

The specs on this board are pretty straight forward.  The i850 (the chip on the bottom left) runs a 400MHz "Quad Pumped" system bus to the processor.  It also generates a fair amount of heat and, as you can see above, a heat sink is installed to keep it cool.  In addition, Intel's ICH2 chip (on bottom right) otherwise known as the I/O Controller Hub, provides for the drive subsystem interface, PCI and CNR Slots, as well as the AC97 Audio, USB and every other peripheral that needs to talk to the system bus.  So, with the exception of the Dual Channel RAMBUS support, the rest of the features are standard equipment, as least as far as the untrained eye can see.  Allow us to dig deeper here and we'll show you a few things you may not see yet.

 

 

Heat and Power

 

Tags:  test, ium, Pentium 4, Pentium, pen

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