SiS 648 - Taking Advantage of the P4 Situation

Quake III Arena Performance

Quake III's usefulness as a gaming benchmark has diminished mostly because of the fact that we're able to consistently produce frame rates over 300 fps at 1024x768 with the fastest video cards. But as the benchmark becomes less GPU limited, it becomes a perfect candidate for CPU and platform tests such as this one.

Gaming Performance Quake III Arena - 1024x768 High Quality SiS 648 (DDR400) Intel 850E (PC1066) VIA P4X400 (DDR333) VIA P4X333 (DDR333) SiS 648 (DDR333) SiS 645DX (DDR333) Intel 845E (DDR266) VIA P4X400 (DDR400) 181.1 180.3 177.7 177.2 176.2 175.6 172.3 167.6 | 0 | 36 | 72 | 109 | 145 | 181 | 217

When armed with DDR400, the SiS 648 chipset ends up being the fastest solution on the chart, even outperforming the 850E with PC1066 RDRAM. With DDR400 the performance boost is around 3% at this resolution over conventional DDR333. What's interesting to note is that the P4X400 is actually much faster with DDR333 than with DDR400, even when using the same timings but simply adjusting operating frequency the DDR400 is significantly outperformed on VIA's P4X400 board.