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 how SDRAM, DDR SDRAM and RDRAM chipsets compare to one another. Therefore we'll be using the same configuration for each chipset, except for the memory and motherboard of course.

System Configuration

• CPU: Intel Pentium 4 2.0 GHz Socket-478
• Motherboard RDRAM: Asus P4T-E, i850 chipset
• Motherboard SDRAM: Asus P4B, i845 chipset
• Motherboard DDR SDRAM #1: Asus P4B266, i845D chipset
• Motherboard DDR SDRAM #2: SiS 645 Reference board, SiS 645 chipset
• Motherboard DDR SDRAM #3: Via P4X266 Reference board, Via P4X266 chipset
• Memory RDRAM: Samsung 2 x 128MB PC-800 RDRAM
• Memory SDRAM: Samsung 2x 128MB PC-133 CAS-2 SDRAM
• Memory DDR SDRAM: Crucial 1 x 256MB PC2100 CAS-2.5 DDR SDRAM
• 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
• OS: Microsoft Windows 2000 Pro, SP2
• Disk Configuration: NTFS, four 20GB partitions
• Resolution/Colordepth: 1024x76/16-bits

All motherboards and CPUs were tested with the same Intel Retail Boxed heatsink, which was used throughout our testing. 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.