Benchmark Preface

Before going knee-deep into the benchmarks, it is well worth making the point that this ASUS 850 board is the first of its type that we've received in the lab, other than Intel's own 850 board. Thus we've not got much to compare it too as of yet (although MSI's offering has just arrived hot off of the press into our lab). Hopefully, we'll soon have a better gauge of how the different 850s from other manufacturers perform in comparison to one another. For now though this is early days so if you're pondering about the best i850 performer, just be sure to hang tight until we test out a few more boards. Also worthy of note, is our Pentium 4 1.5GHz review, where you can look back and compare just how AMD's 760 platform compares in terms of performance. We're not going to run the turbines all over again and tell you what to buy in terms of the overall platform but if it's an i850 and Pentium 4 that you're set on, then this is as far as we've got. As an FYI, be sure to check our new section towards the conclusion called "Ben's Lab Notes”, which details some of the things that we noticed whilst actually using the board over the past week.

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 RDRAM 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 RDRAM, there should be some impressive bandwidth increases.

The scores for both RDRAM based boards are as high as we've ever seen. You'll notice that the ASUS board just edges out (or "pips” if you prefer) the Intel board.

Just as impressive though is the FPU bandwidth score of 1384MB/s –. Again the ASUS 850 board pips the Intel board. Now that we've seen theoretical numbers, let's take a look at something a bit more tangible.