9. Sandra Memory Performance

Those results are much more interesting than the CPU performance numbers, as they show how well (or how poorly) the memory interface of the chipset actually works. Here, Intel's 845 chipset in the Latitude C840 is able to demonstrate the full capacity of DDR-SDRAM. Unfortunately ATi's IGP320M reaches only about 56% of the i845MP score, although both are using PC2100 DDR-SDRAM. You can probably imagine that this low memory bandwidth will most likely have an impact on overall performance. VIA's KN133 chipset, as found in Compaq's Presario 725CA, is showing similar behavior. It reaches only 60% of the memory bandwidth of the i815 chipset found in the Inspirion 8100 notebook, while both are using PC133 SDRAM. An Athlon system suffering from a memory bandwidth of less than 600 MB/s is hardly able to supply impressive performance. The UMA (unified memory architecture) design of the two Athlon chipsets with the integrated graphics is costing them a significant amount of memory bandwidth. Even in 2D, the video part of the memory needs to be read out 60-85 times per second for screen refreshes, which of course generates arbitrary issues that impact system memory access.