Intel's 820 Chipset - Performance using SDRAM

The Motherboards

We had a number of options to choose from when selecting motherboards for this comparison, however we ended up choosing different motherboards for our i820 + RDRAM and i820 + SDRAM test beds simply because of flexibility reasons. 

As we proved in our i820 Motherboard Roundup, the performance difference between all i820 motherboards is negligible and thus wasn’t an issue for us picking different motherboards for the two main test beds.

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For the RDRAM equipped i820 test bed we chose the AOpen AX6C-L because of its ability to manually adjust the RDRAM clock multiplier.  This allowed us to keep the RDRAM transferring at its peak rate of 800MB/s even at the overclocked 150MHz FSB setting we used. 

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For the SDRAM equipped i820 test bed we chose the ASUS P3C-2000 because of its ability to manually adjust the SDRAM clock multiplier.  This allowed us to keep the SDRAM frequency as close to 133MHz as possible regardless of the FSB setting, however because of the fact that the motherboard would lock in the value at 3/4 if the FSB was above 133MHz, we weren’t able to fully level the playing field. 

For the sake of comparison we included our Overclocking the FC-PGA BX and VIA Apollo Pro 133A test beds as well.