WoW done, Pentium M coming along, Wildcat in the pipe
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 23, 2005 12:26 PM EST- Posted in
- Anand
My World of Warcraft Performance Guide is finally done. I ended up turning in around 5AM this morning for a few hours of rest before polishing off the guide. The server I was testing on didn't get back up until around 10PM last night, pretty much wiping out a good day of testing as it was down since 8AM. I couldn't get much done while I was waiting for the server to get back up since my Pentium M testbed was running through hours of WorldBench, Winstone and SYSMark all yesterday.
I'm hoping to be done with the Pentium M article late tonight. So far I'm not too impressed with the performance. It looks like the memory bandwidth deficit of the 855GME chipset isn't that great, as moving to a dual channel memory configuration doesn't improve performance all that much. It looks like the only saving grace for Dothan on the desktop right now (performance wise) is clock speed, otherwise AMD is the much better bet from a performance standpoint (but obviously not from a power consumption standpoint, and once again I'm talking strictly desktop).
Derek is also working on a Wildcat article that should be ready by the end of tonight as well, so either his piece or my Pentium M piece will be up tomorrow morning for you all to check out. The remaining article will be up on Friday.
Now that the WoW article is done, time to cook up some breakfast...err brunch and get back to it. We actually had a reasonably warm day yesterday, it was about 51 when I went out scavenging for food here in Branford...not too shabby. Unfortunately it's back to cloudy and unfriendly temperatures today it seems.
I'm hoping to be done with the Pentium M article late tonight. So far I'm not too impressed with the performance. It looks like the memory bandwidth deficit of the 855GME chipset isn't that great, as moving to a dual channel memory configuration doesn't improve performance all that much. It looks like the only saving grace for Dothan on the desktop right now (performance wise) is clock speed, otherwise AMD is the much better bet from a performance standpoint (but obviously not from a power consumption standpoint, and once again I'm talking strictly desktop).
Derek is also working on a Wildcat article that should be ready by the end of tonight as well, so either his piece or my Pentium M piece will be up tomorrow morning for you all to check out. The remaining article will be up on Friday.
Now that the WoW article is done, time to cook up some breakfast...err brunch and get back to it. We actually had a reasonably warm day yesterday, it was about 51 when I went out scavenging for food here in Branford...not too shabby. Unfortunately it's back to cloudy and unfriendly temperatures today it seems.
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blckgrffn - Tuesday, March 29, 2005 - link
Ah yes, going through the Video section, I see the review for the 6600's and 6200's...nice. Not sure how I missed it, as I typically check Anandtech many times everyday and read all of the reviews... I would still like a guide for using your PC with a high-def TV though.Nat
Nick - Saturday, March 26, 2005 - link
A laptop based test of the 533 FSB dothans vs the 400 FSB. I want to know how much performance changed with the switch (DDR2 and all).crimson117 - Friday, March 25, 2005 - link
It'd be cool to see a review of various TV-on-PC cards and programs, though I don't know what you'd go by...Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, March 25, 2005 - link
Thanks for the input guys, here's what I can report thus far:1) The Realizm 800 article just went up this morning, we will hopefully have more benches from it shortly though.
2) Kris is working on a Dell 20" vs. Apple 20" widescreen head-to-head comparison.
3) I've put in requests for the 512MB boards, it looks like it'll be another month or so before they're really available but I'll keep working on this one.
4) We have a 6200 Turbo Cache article planned for the next couple of weeks. We have already done a review of the non-GT 6600.
That's all for now, I'll post progress on the blog as I can.
xtknight - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
one thing i forgot to add is that on the low end benchmarks and reviews in the future, a good thing to do is to add high-end cards from last generation that are as cheap as new-gen value cards. for example, on the 6200 and 6600 benchmarks it would be helpful to see how a 9600xt compares.xtknight - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
i agree guytona. i think a "comprehensive video card guide" is a good idea, discussing the different factors of video cards like pipelines, and what affects performance in certain situations. like...what's most beneficial to antialiasing performance? pipelines? engine clock? memory clock? honestly i have no idea. some tests on that, as well as anisotropic filtering, mipmap quality, etc... would be neat. what performs better? 1024x768 4xAA, 16xAF or 1280x1024 0xAA 0xAF? which cards are the best in different situations (AA/AF, etc.)? all of that across high-end,mid-range,value ranges? that would be awesome. i want next-gen rumors too! ;) also a mac version of "Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory" came out just a few days ago, which you could include on future mac benchmarks.blckgrffn - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
I would like to see a comparison between all the TC 6200's, the 6200's and 6600's in both AGP and PCI-express, are the 6600's 8 pipes really hampered by the reduced memory bandwidth?What I would really like to see is a good comprehensive guide on how to hook up both ATI and NVIDIA cards to an HDTV use both component and DVI. It seems difficult to do right now, with the overscanning and third party tools that seem necessary right now.
Any of that would be great :)
Nat
enthusiast - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
Here are some products I'm interested to know more about :- Quadro fx 4400 512mb
- 3DLabs realizm 800
- any new or unique 20",21" LCD monitors
- ATI and Nvidia 512mb video card benchmark comparison
- ATI xpress 200 chipset, AMD mainboards
such as MSI RS480M2-IL and a Sapphire board shown at CEBIT
- video card driver investigation about the temperature increase (bug) in forceware 71.84
nvidia 6800 series
Keep up the good work. thanks!
guytona - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
Wow, I've always dreamed of this... Ummm... Well, I've wanted to see a comprehensive video card guide, and maybe more motherboard reviews. Otherwise, you guys are doing a great job. Thanks a lot.someone - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - link
Wow, it looks Anand has too much free time on his hands as he is actually replying back to reader posts.Good job, Anand. :)