After looking at a schematic of the NetBurst micro-architecture, the first specification to spark our interest was the 3.2GB/s of theoretical memory bandwidth. We are fully aware by now that no benchmarks ever achieve the theoretical peak, but with 3.2GB/s, our expectations were significantly higher than an i815E system operating on a 133MHz bus.

To get a more realistic feel for attainable bandwidth we used SiSoft's Sandra, which runs a series of mathematical operations and averages them together. Let's take a look at how Intel's quad-pumped 100MHz bus compares to their 133MHz i815 and AMD's 200MHz 760 chipset.

Dual RDRAM channels pay off for the i850 chipset; landing the largest memory bandwidth number we have ever seen. Compared to the i815E running a 133MHz bus, Intel's quad-pumped 100MHz bus delivers more than three times as much memory performance. Even AMD's newly released 100MHz double-pumped DDR platform can't keep up and scores less than half the bandwidth.