As mentioned in the introduction the Pentium 4 is meant to do exceptionally well with multimedia applications and games as its high-bandwidth, low latency architecture is meant to perform well under these conditions. Therefore it is worthwhile to investigate whether the i845 is able to uphold the Pentium 4’s performance. Therefore we’ll be using two identical configurations, except for the motherboards, one will feature the i845-chipset the other the i850-chipset.

System Configuration

• CPUs: Intel Pentium 4 1.5 and 2.0 GHz Socket-478
• Motherboards: Intel D850MD and Intel D845WN
• Memory: Samsung PC133 CAS2 256MB SDRAM, 2x 128MB PC800 RDRAM
• Videocard: Elsa Gladiac 920, GeForce3 64Mb
• Harddisk: Western Digital Caviar WD800BB 80GB, 7200RPM
• CDROM: Toshiba SD-M1212 6x DVD/32x CDROM
• Floppy: Generic 1.44 MB
• Case: Generic Midi-ATX
• Powersupply: Delta 300 Watts Intel-P4-Approved

Software Configuration

• OS: Microsoft Windows 2000 Pro, SP2
• Disk Configuration: NTFS, four 20GB partitions
• Resolution/Colordepth: 1024x76/16-bits
• Driver video: Detonator 4, v20.81
• DirectX: DirectX v8.0a
• Busmaster: Intel v6.31.00

Both motherboards feature the new 478-pin socket for Intel's Pentium 4 and were equipped with an Intel Retail Boxed heatsink which was used throughout our testing. The memory was run at the motherboard's default settings both in case of SDRAM and RDRAM, and quite frankly neither motherboard offered any memory tweaking. All tests were run a minimum of three times and the results were averaged as to cancel out any highs and lows, this in order to get an accurate representation of real-world performance.



Fig 3. The Intel D850MD i850-chipset motherboard in micro-ATX formfactor. Featuring dual channel RDRAM, a total of seven USB ports, three PCI slots, onboard sound and LAN and one CNR riser.



Fig 4. The Intel D845WN i845-chipset motherboard in standard ATX formfactor. Featuring three PC133 SDRAM sockets, four USB ports, six PCI slots, onboard sound and LAN.