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Benchmarks
and Comparisons |
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Back to the Futuremark |
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Futuremark's
3DMark 2001:
To get another
look at a synthetic score, we chose Futuremark's 3DMark 2001
SE. It generates an overall score, after rendering
scenes and measuring performance using the MaxFX game
engine, found in Remedy's popular game Max Payne. We
ran two series of tests on each configuration, once at
800x600 with 32-bit color and again at 1024x768x32, both
times with all other program settings left at their
defaults.
There's a lot to
talk about here, so let's get to it. At stock speed
and using DDR333 settings, the VIA P4PB falls right in
between the two Intel-based boards we used as reference.
It's better than the MSI board, yet not as good as the
Gigabyte board, which was one of the best 845PE boards we
have tested. When we went to using DDR400, instead of
the "overall performance increase" we mentioned earlier, the
numbers actually took a nosedive, dropping 600 points or so,
a 4% decrease in performance. This score turned out to
be the lowest out of any we obtained. Going back to
DDR333, and then overclocking the system to 150MHz for the
front side bus, we pushed the 3DMark score up and over the
15,000 barrier.
At the higher
resolution setting of 1024X768, the gaps were narrower, with
the Gigabyte board just nudging past the VIA board, who in
turn beat out the MSI board once again. Unfortunately
for the VIA P4PB, going up to DDR400 cost it some points
again, and wound up with the lowest score on the chart.
Back to overclocking, the score jumped from 12,605 up to
13,341, a change of almost 6%.
Futuremark's
PCMark2002:
Another test
from Futuremark that we use here at HotHardware is PCMark
2002. This test performs a series of CPU tasks such as image
compression, text searches, and audio conversion to give us
three scores: CPU, Memory, and Hard Disk Drive (HDD).
It is a relatively quick process for comparing the
performance of two or more systems. We ran PCMark 2002
at 133MHz FSB with both memory timings, and then ran another
set after getting a stable overclock at 150MHz. Since
there wasn't much to be garnered from the Hard drive module,
we have only included the CPU and Memory tests.
The VIA P4PB
Ultra put up another good showing in the CPU module, only
taken by the Gigabyte 8PE667 by a mere 9 points, which is
completely negligible. Even this score suffers,
although very slightly, when the memory speed is raised to
400MHz. On a good note, the DDR400 score was still
better than the MSI 845PE, which placed last overall.
Overclocking the system gave us the all-important
performance boost that geeks like us love.
In the Memory
module, the VIA board got beat pretty handily regardless of
whether it was using DDR333 or DDR400. The drop-off
from switching between the two was 329 points, which was
down between 5 and 6 percent from the original score.
This may be another case where running memory asynchronous
to the CPU just doesn't add up to better performance.
Some gaming
scores
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