SiSoft Sandra
The first benchmark test is with SiSoft Sandra which has a few CPU specific tests:
- CPU Dhrystone - contains a representative sample of various numerical operations.
- CPU Whetstone - measures floating point (FPU) performance which is prevalent in scientific, engineering, and CAD programs.
- Integer MMX and Floating Point - multimedia benchmark which is designed to show the improvements of MMX, 3DNow!, and SSE. This benchmark generates a picture (640x480) of the well-known Mandelbrot fractal, using 255 iterations for each data pixel, in 32 colours.
SiSoft Sandra Benchmark Results
Millions of Instructions Per Second
With a 22% increase in MIPS (millions of instructions per second) for the Dhrystone and Whetstone benchmarks, the P3-550E doesn't really blow away the P2-450MHz which was expected. However, the multimedia benchmark, which consist of the Integer MMX and Floating Point FPU test, is another story as the Pentium 3 SSE instruction set is put to good use in this benchmark.
SiSoft Sandra also provides a variety of system reports one of which is a detailed listing of processor capabilities. The following screenshots show a few of the differences between the P2-450 and P3-550E:
L2 Cache Settings - P3-550E
CPU Core Voltage - P3-550E
3DWinBench 2000
Next up is ZDNet's 3DWinBench 2000 Processor Test. The Processor Test treats the graphics card as a Null device and runs the entire 3D WinMark tests meaning that the processor is carrying the workload. 3DWinBench 2000 also makes use of MMX, 3DNow!, and SSE instruction sets. Results of this test are number of triangles rendered per second and the graph shows the percent increase of the P3-550E over the P2-450.
3D WinBench 2000 Processor Test (640x480x16bpp)
Percent Increase In Triangles Per Second (P3-550E vs P2-450)
Overall Increase: 96%
With an overall increase of 96% over the P2-450, the P3-550E can pump out the triangles. This is especially apparent in the traingle intensive tests which consist of the Speedway (65K triangles), Hangar, and the Chapel (18K).
Quake 2
Finally, let's take a look at the processor intensive Quake 2 Crusher demo. Crusher consists of a 34 player deathmatch demo to 75 frags on the Boss2 map and is used to test a system under the worst of multi-player conditions.
Quake 2 Crusher - 16 Bit Color
Frames Per Second
All righty, let's get down to business and give this processor some overclocking luvin' and see how Quake 3 Arena runs!
Next Page: Overclocking With Quake 3 Arena!
