To evaluate how much of a performance increase PC-1066 and PC-1200 offer when running multimedia tasks such as games and other streaming content we'll be using Quake III. Although Quake III is becoming a rather old benchmark and not really representative of a good overall multimedia benchmark it is often used, mostly by manufacturers, to show the performance of the Pentium 4 which is exactly what we're after in this case.



Fig 8. The benchmark speaks for itself, PC-1066 and PC-1200 are able to offer some increase in bandwidth, whether this is due to the higher clockspeed on the AGP bus or the memory is yet to be determined though.

One thing is clear by looking at the Quake III benchmarks, PC-1066 and PC-1200, or 133 and 150MHz FSB, do offer a nice increase in performance. If we look at the Quake III results once more in terms of % increase, or decrease, in performance we find the following:

Pentium 4 1.5GHz, i850 chipset
Quake III fp/s: (PC-1066/PC-800) = (221.6/215.1) » 2.9%
Quake III fp/s: (PC-1200/PC-800) = (228.1/215.1) » 6.0%

Pentium 4 2.0GHz, i850 chipset
Quake III fp/s: (PC-1066/PC-800) = (264.1/253.6) » 4.1%
Quake III fp/s: (PC-1200/PC-800) = (275.2/253.6) » 8.6

At 1.5GHz PC-1200 only gives you a 6.0% gain over PC-800. Even when using a 2GHz Pentium 4 and PC-1200 performance isn’t really reaching new heights. Again, the 2GHz Pentium 4 scales better overall, whereas the 1.5GHz is clearly lagging behind. As for other games, we’re quite sure some games may benefit greatly whereas others may not benefit at all, like Quake III, this is largely due to the fact that at higher resolutions the videocard becomes a bottleneck rather than the CPU or the memory subsystem.