Soyo's P4I Fire Dragon & P4S Dragon Ultra P4 i845D and

Soyo's P4I Fire Dragon & P4S Dragon Ultra
SiS 645 and i845D Compete - Soyo Style

By, Dave Altavilla
February 18, 2002

 
The Ziff Davis eTesting Labs suite of Winstone tests measure over all system performance based on a number of multi-tasking test runs utilizing the following Business and Content Creation Apps:
 

Business Winstone 2001:

• Five Microsoft Office 2000 applications (Access, Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, and Word)
• Microsoft Project 98
• Lotus Notes R5
• NicoMak WinZip
• Norton AntiVirus
• Netscape Communicator

Content Creation Winston 2002:

• Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1
• Adobe Premiere 6.0
• Macromedia Director 8.5
• Macromedia Dreamweaver UltraDev 4
• Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.01.00.3055
• Netscape Navigator 6/6.01
• Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 5.0c (build 184)

ZD eTesting Labs Business Winstone 2001 and Content Creation Winstone 2002 Office and Professional Application Benchmarks

We decided to throw in a reference score from the Abit BD7-RAID, an i845D based board that we reviewed not long ago.  There are some fairly interesting observations here.  The Abit board does make a very strong showing for the i845D with the Fire Dragon very close behind.  As a matter of fact, the score differences between the two i845Ds are insignificant to the end user in terms of real world performance.  On the other hand, we were surprised to see that the SiS645 based P4S Dragon Ultra actually fell behind the two i845D boards in the Business test.  Our theory is that the SiS645 leaves a little to be desired in terms of EIDE drive controller performance.  All Winstone tests are EXTREMELY drive throughput sensitive and we think the slightly younger, less mature SiS645 chipset drivers may have something to do with overall hard disk subsystem performance being slightly behind the i845D. 

However, the increased memory throughput of the SiS645 at DDR333 levels versus the two i845Ds at DDR266, propel it past the two Intel based boards, regardless of the disk performance, forcing it to fight with a bit of a disadvantage.  In the end, for any of these tests, all boards represented here are within 2% of each other performance wise.  These are excellent scores all around for Soyo's new DDR based P4 boards.

Let's Quake and wrap this rascal...

Quake 3 and the ratings