Poor Sandra memory benchmark on Athlon

[elmes]

I have an Athlon 650 with 256MB Ram and MSI 6167 MB, G400 32MB
I was running SiSoft Sandra benchmarks and was surprised at the memory benchmark:
The Athlon 650 gets 225MB CPU & 185MB FPU
The reference Pentium 500 however scores 280MB CPU, 260MB FPU
Is this right, I thought Athlon ought to get better marks than this at least better than a P3-500?

[Rags]

Hi elmes,

At the moment this is just the way it is with Athlon motherboards, and VIA chipset boards whether they are slot one or SS7. This is due to poor driver performance, and slower memory timings (done on purpose for stability). Even the PC133 VIA boards can't compete in memory performance when compared to a BX chipset, and if you bump the BX chipset up to 133Mhz, the result is even greater. The only current chipset from Intel that any of these boards can compare well against is the Camino boards with the memory translater hub.

Rags

[Thundrchez]

Don't put your faith in any artificial benchmark out there, elmes.

The fact of the matter is that the Athlon is kicking some major Intel @ss. Your Athlon 650 can blow the doors off of a Pentium 500.

The EV6 bus on the Athlon boards is extremely faster than anything Intel has at the moment. It is running at 200MHz which blows the doors off of the i440BX running at 100 or even overclocked to 133. It is unfortunate that it has to go asnych to DRAM because we are still at the PC100/PC133 stage instead of PC200!!!

VIA on super7 is notably slower than the BX chipset. I've been all around disappointed in the super7 scene. But now I've got my Athlon and I like it a lot!

The MSI board is using exclusively a AMD chipset, right? I've got the Asus K7M which uses the AMD 751 northbridge and a VIA southbridge.

[Wombat]

Yes, the MS-6167 is an all AMD board.

[Rags]

What sucks is that the EV6 bus has little or no benefits when you have your RAM sitting at a lower state than the rest of the system, the only time you are going to see ANY benefit from the EV6 bus is when they go to sync. bus speeds, or you have a Multi Processor system (due to true Point to Point protocall, and independent buses). Single chip, the subsystem performance is sub-par compared to a BX chipset, of course, this could very well change.

Rags

[Greebe]

Ya the 6167 has the AMD 751 northbridge and 756 southbridge.

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