Author Topic: Hey Bloom25... forgot what you said about 845 vs 850 chipsets (Read 490 times)

AKDejaVu · « **on:** December 18, 2001, 05:06:00 PM »

A local store is selling an 845 mo/bo CPU package for $239 (P4-1.7GHz 478pin).

I don't remember what you were saying about the 845 vs 850 chipsets. Could you refresh my memory?

AKDejaVu

[ 12-18-2001: Message edited by: AKDejaVu ]

715 · « **Reply #1 on:** December 18, 2001, 10:27:00 PM »

Aren't 845 chipset motherboards a bad choice? I thought those only supported SDR SDRAM. Intel is coming out with a new version of the 845 that will allow DDR SDRAM support. I don't think its available yet. Via and SiS do have DDR chipsets for the P4 but I think Via's has legal problems with Intel. The 850 supports RDRAM which is as fast as DDR but is much more expensive.

Then again, perhaps I have misread the various web sources of info on this.

bloom25 · « **Reply #2 on:** December 19, 2001, 10:18:00 AM »

The current i845s are SDRAM only! Don't EVER get one of these. That system with a P4 1.7 Ghz will perform at about the same level as a 1 GHz P3.

Intel officially released a DDR version of the i845 yesterday that supports DDR ram. This one performs close to the i850 boards. These won't be available on store shelves for a while though.

I was looking at some benchmarks the other day at a few websites. One I remember that illustrates the point well was a Quake 3 bench at 640x480 16 bit color. The P4 2Ghz on i850 got 226 fps and the same processor on the i845 (both had 256Mb ram) got 162 fps. You might want to look around at toms and anandtech.

AKDejaVu · « **Reply #3 on:** December 19, 2001, 10:47:00 AM »

Thanks for the info. The mobo looked kinda hoaky... they advertised it with a 400 MHz FSB, but with SDRAM. It popped into my head that you had said something on this a while ago, but I couldn't find the link.

Thanks again..

AKDejaVu

Camel · « **Reply #4 on:** December 19, 2001, 05:02:00 PM »

http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q4/011217/index.html

Here you will see the i845 up against the, Intel850, Inteli845D, SiS645, and Via. It doesnt do very well.

I just ordered the Asus P4S333(SiS645), with Kingmax ddr333, should arrive tommorow.

<Edit> I was just poking around at www.multiwave.com and they have the Asus P4B266 i845D(ddr266) in stock.<edit>

[ 12-19-2001: Message edited by: Camel ]

bloom25 · « **Reply #5 on:** December 21, 2001, 01:44:00 AM »

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/reviews/article/1395.1/

I found another article for you to read. AKDejaVu, if you go with an SDRAM powered P4 system I'll laugh at you every time I see your handle.

I don't suppose you would consider an Athlon XP powered system on a nForce board (like the MSI K7N266 Pro)? I just did one a couple days ago and I was very impressed with it.

It's actually kind of unfortunate that nearly all of the people who buy off-the-shelf systems from Dell, Compaq, Gateway, etc, are getting i845 based systems. I wonder if they realize their "old" P3 1 Ghz actually is outperforming their new "state of the art" P4 1.5 Ghz. ("Dude, you're getting a Dell!"

)

The funniest thing of all is that a 2 Ghz P4 on the Asus P4B benchmarks nearly equivilantly to a Duron 1.2 Ghz on the Asus A7V266-E. You can almost built an entire system with a Duron 1.2 for just the price of the P4 2 Ghz.

AKDejaVu · « **Reply #6 on:** December 21, 2001, 11:53:00 AM »

Quote

The funniest thing of all is that a 2 Ghz P4 on the Asus P4B benchmarks nearly equivilantly to a Duron 1.2 Ghz on the Asus A7V266-E. You can almost built an entire system with a Duron 1.2 for just the price of the P4 2 Ghz.

Ummm.. bloom.. are you trying to say that a Duron 1.2 is equivelant to a p4 2GHz with any chipset or just with this Asus Mobo? I have a tendancy to think you may be in error... or saying things in a very deceptive manner.

AKDejaVu

Tumor · « **Reply #7 on:** December 21, 2001, 12:26:00 PM »

A Duron 1.2 will not give you the same performance as a PIV 2.0ghz, I don't care what the AMD pumpers have to say about it.

Tumor

bloom25 · « **Reply #8 on:** December 21, 2001, 06:57:00 PM »

I'm saying that a P4 2Ghz on an i845 based motherboard will give equivilant performance to a duron 1.2 Ghz on a VIA KT266a board. On an i850 board the 2 Ghz P4 would slaughter that Duron. All I was doing was illustrating a point.

I guess I should have just said, don't buy an i845 based P4 system. (Unless it's the new DDR enabled i845.)

bloom25 · « **Reply #9 on:** December 21, 2001, 07:16:00 PM »

Quote

Ummm.. bloom.. are you trying to say that a Duron 1.2 is equivelant to a p4 2GHz with any chipset or just with this Asus Mobo? I have a tendancy to think you may be in error... or saying things in a very deceptive manner.

I didn't mean to be deceptive. What I meant was that the i845 (with PC133 SDRAM memory) hurts the performance of the P4 so much that a Duron 1.2 Ghz on the VIA kt266a (high performance DDR PC2100 memory) can match its performance. I did not say that a 2 Ghz P4 itself was "the same speed" as a 1.2Ghz Duron. I just picked two Asus boards because I'm familar with them. The P4B uses the i845 chipset and the A7V266-E uses the kt266a chipset. I probably shouldn't have put that last paragraph in, as it seems to have confused some of you.

The P4 requires high bandwidth memory to perform well. If you put low bandwidth SDRAM on it it's like putting a brick wall on its maximum performance. On an i845 board, the performance of a 1.7 Ghz P4 is only about 5% less than a 2 Ghz P4. This tells you that the 2 Ghz P4s performance is being severely limited.

I'll try to find you some benchmarks that illustrate this so you don't have to just take my word for it. (But I'm hoping I've clarified my point enough.

)

What I probably should have said is that:

If you want a high performance Pentium 4 system, do NOT put it on an i845 motherboard. If you do, you are spending much more money than you need to for that level of performance.

Edit:

Ok, heres some low resolution Q3 benchmarks of Athlon XPs and the 1.2 Duron on KT266a boards and the P4 on i850 boards.
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q4/011116/duron1200-04.html

You can see the P4 2 Ghz leads the pack by a couple fps at the low resolutions with 249 fps. The Duron 1.2 get 165.6 fps.

Now if you put the P4 2 Ghz on an i845 board as in here: http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/reviews/article/1395.5/ you can see the P4 drops to 176 fps. This isn't far from the Duron 1.2 Ghz. On this same page you can see the huge performance hit the P4 takes by going to SDRAM (73 fps in low resolution Quake 3, OUCH!

).

[ 12-21-2001: Message edited by: bloom25 ]

Camel · « **Reply #10 on:** December 21, 2001, 08:54:00 PM »

Yup bloom, understood!

The i845D is different than the i845, it should have a pretty good impact on value peformance, along with other DDR solutions finally for the P4.

Tomorrow night I hope to be posting on a 1.8 P4 w/ Kingmax DDR 333 or pc2700(supported). All the peices of the puzzle have arrived!

Camel

bloom25 · « **Reply #11 on:** December 22, 2001, 05:47:00 PM »

From the above posts I've come to the conclusion that a basic knowledge of the chipsets for a particular processor may be lacking.

I'll work on writing up an article on each of the available chipsets for the Athlons (Socket A) and Pentium 4 (Socket 423 and 478) with some detail on their strengths and weaknesses.