Benchmark Preface

Before going knee-deep into the benchmarks, it is well worth making the point that this Iwill board is not a final rev and Iwill has made it known to us that the performance at this point is not quite 'final' either. With that in mind, we at SE don't usually go out full guns blazing in previews a la' Mel Gibson with his Hollywood assault on all things Britain (it's not my fault he didn't know what to do without "freedooooom").

Therefore this is more of a 'preview' look and a follow-up to the last piece we did. As far as stability was concerned, we will also reserve judgement once we get our serrated teeth on a retail board. But just as an FYI we did encounter a few hiccups, which you can see in Ben's "Lab Notes" section. Bear in mind that this product is still under development and that these types of problems are not at all unusual at this level of development. The scores shown here are only an early representation of what will come. We'll be looking to Iwill to correct these issues as development continues.

As computer processor speeds continue to climb like Sherpas, it's just a matter of time until your computer struggles to keep the processor supplied with data and instructions. Unless, of course, the system memory bandwidth increases appropriately. Raw bandwidth is where we expect the DDR memory interface to excel, and SiSoft Sandra is just the tool to measure this performance. Using a combination of calculations, Sandra reports an average for both the CPU and the FPU. Between the increased front side bus speed and the DDR RAM, there should be some impressive bandwidth increases.

The first thing you'll notice is that we're using Sandra 2001 and not 2000. The second thing you'll see is that AMD's Corona system really performs here, with bandwidth numbers higher than we've ever seen before. The CPU score of 567MB/s is 17% above the 1.2GHz system equipped with normal SDRAM. And almost at the same level (at 562MB/s) is the ALi MAGiK 1 DDR chipset. It's not only a good sign to see ALI keeping up with AMD's Corona here but once again you can see the advantage that DDR Ram has over age-old SDR, which the KT-133 system used coming in last.

Even more impressive though is the FPU bandwidth score of 768MB/s – roughly 40% more than the 1.2GHz system paired with a KT133 motherboard. It's the same story in Windows 2000, with the ALI and VIA DDR chipsets both steaming ahead of the KT-133 SDRAM based system. Now that we've seen theoretical numbers, let's take a look at something a bit more tangible.