First post, by nekurahoka
- Rank
- Member
So, I've recently been rebuilding a Pentium II system I bought a few months ago for parts ($10, craigslist). It's a Dell Dimension XPS R400. I've never been a fan of OEMs, so I originally intended to pull parts from it for my 1999 build (in sig). Both builds are very similar; 400MHz intel CPUs, comparable memory etc. And I thought it would be cool to compare the two. I used the same expansion cards and HDD for these tests; a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI and an ESS Audiodrive 1869f ISA.
The Specs:
1999 Build
Intel Celeron 400MHz CPU, 66MHz FSB, 128K full-speed Cache (66MHz); actually runs at 401MHz
PC Chips M715 Motherboard, i440EX/LX chipset (behaves like an EX)
192MB 66MHz SDRAM, Crucial @ 2CL
Dell Dimension XPS R400
Intel Pentium II 400MHz CPU, 100Mhz FSB, 512k half-speed cache (50Mhz); actually runs at 398MHz
Dell OEM motherboard, i400BX chipset
320MB 100MHz SDRAM, 2 sticks mixed brands
So, the Pentium has the advantage in a faster bus and faster RAM. The Celeron has an advantage in having a full speed bus to its L2 cache, but it is significantly smaller. The Celeron also runs at 1% faster clock speed.
The Tests
All tests were performed in WinXP SP1. Intel Chipset Drivers version 3.2.
SciSoft Sandra 2001 Standard
CPU Benchmark:
PCChips: 1083 / 537 (mips / mflops)
Dell: 1075 / 534
CPU Multimedia Benchmark:
PCChips: 1475 / 584 (mmx / fpu)
Dell: 1458 / 578
Memory Benchmark:
PCChips: 147 / 163 (int / float)
Dell: 232 / 316
So, the straight calculation benchmarks pretty much line up with the 3MHz clock speed difference, but the memory bench is much more than just the bus speed difference. 50% in the case of the float test. Might be the Pentium II L2 cache coming into play?
Now PCMark shows some dramatic performance differences:
PCmark2002
CPU / Memory / HDD
PCChips: 1026 / 951 / 195
Dell: 1046 / 987 / 461
The HDD score is radically different. I can tell you that using the two systems, the performance is palpably different. The Dell is much more responsive loading. Both systems have bus mastering properly enabled and should not with the same HDD perform that differently. At most there should be about a 33% difference due to the bus speed, but the Dells HD access is 2.3X faster. That's bonkers. I suspect this may be a PCChips issue. They are renown for using fake cache and fake chipsets. I think that the chipset may be reporting UDMA33 for the HDD, but not actually transferring at that speed.
3DMark2001 SE
Voodoo3 Graphics, DirectX 9.0c, 640x480x16
PC Chips: 438
Dell: 532
A 21% difference, probably due to higher memory bus speeds.
As it stands, I've switched over to the Dell system and I've grown fond after researching it.
Dell Dimension XPS R400, 512MB SDRAM, Voodoo3 2000 AGP, Turtle Beach Montego, ESS Audiodrive 1869f ISA, Dreamblaster Synth S1
Dell GH192, P4 3.4 (Northwood), 4GB Dual Channel DDR, ATI Radeon x1650PRO 512MB, Audigy 2ZS, Alacritech 2000 Network Accelerator