Intel’s i845 (SDRAM) Chipset

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Table of Results

Below is the complete table of results. The i815EP based Soyo TISU is the same I’ve used in previous tests, as are the Intel D850MD with the i850 chipset. New to this test is the Soyo P4ISR which uses the new i845 SDRAM Socket 478 Pentium 4 chipset. Unfortunately I did have to use a pre-production BIOS in order to finish the test. As soon as I am able to test with a production BIOS I’ll do some re-testing just to make sure the results are valid (if anything, the performance should go up).

Soyo appears to be making a commitment to the P4 market and they have two i845 mainboards coming to market. The P4ISR I tested, which has a Promise ATA/100 / RAID controller, and the P4IS2, which is the same but without the Promise controller. I’d be expecting to see other manufactures releasing similar products soon also. The P4ISR is a pretty traditional product. It has 1 AGP slot (with one of the best locking mechanisms for an AG card I’ve seen so far), 6 PCI slots & 1 CNR (shared with the last PCI) slot. Standard AC97 sound (can be disabled via a DIP switch) is used along with a normal ATX I/O panel with 2 USB ports along with a header on the mainboard for 2 more USB ports. Soyo does include overclocking features such as the HostClk speed and core voltage, and even the multiplier override, which I used to set the Intel supplied P4 2.0 to 1.5GHz (real nice for testing, but you can’t buy a CPU that isn’t multiplier locked). Overall the mainboard, along with the i845 chipset and the P4 CPU, were trouble free. Under Windows you just have to load the supplied .inf update.

Soyo P4ISR Mainboard

It’s interesting to see the Promise RAID 0 results. Other than the Winbench disk test it just doesn’t show any advantage. But that is more due to how the Winstone and SYSmark test are designed, run and scored then a reflection of RAID 0 performance. If you have an application that streams a lot of data to and from the hard disk your overall system speed will benefit. You just need to decide if your system usage reflects what RAID 0 has to offer. The Promise controller also supports RAID 1 (for data security) and can be set via a jumper as an ATA/100 port allowing you to connect 4 more IDE devices (for a total of eight) to the Soyo P4ISR. All and all a well thought out full featured mainboard to build a latest generation system from.

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