Testing and Benchmarks
For the testing I decided to put the G33 Bear Lake chipset up against the NF650i and NF680i chipsets to get a comparison. To do this I had to pull the my Intel C2D 6420 and the 2gigs of Crucial Ballistix Tracer PC2-8500 from my main system temporarily for the testing to be the same setup and comparison. All testing was done under the Windows XP Pro OS.
I was curious as to what the onboard video was capable of so I ran 3DMark06 and well it wasn’t good.. probably the lowest score I have seen yet at 224 3dmarks, so I want be benching any games in this review and we’ll just focus on the chipset and CPU abilities.
Most of the test are done using SiSoft Sandra 2007 SP3, and I threw in Super Pi at the end for good measure.
Sandra 2007 Processor Multi-Media
Benchmark the (W)MMX, SSE/2/3/4 processor units. Shows how your processors handle multi-media instructions and data. Such operations are used by more specialized software, e.g. image manipulation, video decoders/encoders, and games. The test involves the generation of Mandelbrot Set fractals that are used to realistically describe and generate natural objects such as mountains or clouds. By using various multi-media extensions (Wireless) MMX, 3DNow!, SSE(2/3/4) better performance is achieved. (Higher is better)
Sandra 2007 Memory Bandwidth
Benchmark the memory bandwidth of your computer. Shows how your memory sub-systems compare. The benchmark is based on the well-known STREAM memory benchmark. (Higher is better)
Sandra 2007 Memory Latency
Benchmark the latency (response time) of processors’ caches and memory. Shows how your processors’ caches and memory sub-systems compare. The latency of caches is measured in processor clocks (i.e. how many clocks it takes for the data to be ready) as it is dependent on the processor clock speed.
The latency of memory is measured in nanoseconds as it is typically independent on processor clock speed(lower is better)
Sandra 2007 Multi-Core Efficiency
Benchmark the multi-core efficiency of the processors. Shows how efficient the processor cores and their inter-connects are in comparison to other types to other typical processors.
The ability of the cores to process data blocks and pass them to another core for processing (producer-consumer paradigm) of different sizes and different chain sizes is measured. The efficiency of the inter-connect between cores is thus benchmarked; however, the number of cores (and processors) also counts as more data buffers can be processed simultaneously (aka “in flight”).
True multi-core processors that have shared L2/L3 caches will thus perform much better than cores that have separate caches and are connected by the traditional FSB.
Inter-Core Bandwidth :Results Interpretation : Higher index values are better.
Inter-Core Latency :Results Interpretation : Lower index values are better
Sandra 2007 Power Management Efficiency
Benchmark the power management efficiency of the processors. Shows how efficient the power management of your processors is. The ability of the processors to step-down in frequency and voltage at different workloads is measured. The more a processor steps down in both frequency and voltage the better the score at the specific workload. The test stops when the workload is too great the processor even at 100% efficiency.
The ALU/FPU score is a geometric mean based on the whole range of workloads; thus the power of the processor does matter in obtaining a higher score.
The Power Efficiency score is a geometric mean based on the supported workloads only. Thus the power of the processors does not matter. (Higher is better)
The final test is Super Pi calculated to 1 million places, of course lower score is better, meaning less time to calculate.
As you can see from all the tests the Intel G33 chipset is pretty much equal to the NF650i, and sometimes coming in a close second to the NF680i chipset, it truly is a great chipset/motherboard.