Looking at the Intel P35 Express chipset
The next few months left in 2007 will certainly be anything but dull. First on the list is the launch of AMD's very late Barcelona processors. Hopefully, we're going to see desktop variants by the end of the year. AMD's graphic division is aslo scheduled to release a refresh of their Radeon HD2900XT. On the other side of the fence, rumor has it NVIDIA is already prepping up G92 for November launch. And of course, semiconductor giant hopes to maintain their lead with the release of Yorkfield and Wolfdale.Out of these three manufacturers, Intel is by far the one with the clearest roadmap. Dual core Wolfdale and the quad core Yorkfiled, desktop members of the new Penryn family of processors are refreshes of Intel's very successful Core 2 Duo family of processors. Intel announced these processors several months ago, offering juicy tidbits - performance improvements between 10 to 40 percent with certain application workloads compared to existing Core 2 Duo processors, the use of 45 nm high k manufacturing and expected spees in excess of 3 GHz.
With the annoucements of new processors Intel also made announcements of new chipsets. Generation 3 Series chipsets include Q33, Q35, G31, G33, G35, P31, P35 Express chipsets. However, unlike previous products, these chipsets (atl least some of them) and motherboards using them are already on the market for tsome time. First announced at Computex this year, these chipsets are successor to Intel's own P965 and G965 chipsets. What sets apart these chipsets from the previous generation are support for 1333 MHz bus, a reworked memory controller allowing DDR3-SDRAM support (only for P35 and G33 at this time) and of course, support for the newly announced 45 nm Penryn family of processors.
Today, we're going to take a look at a member of the Generation 3 Series - the Intel P35 Express chipset.
Setting Up
Thanks to Gigabyte, we managed to get samples of two boards, the Gigabyte P35-DS3P with DDR2 and P35-DQ6 for this test. For comparison, we're going to use our trusty Gigabyte DS3P to represent P965. We flash the BIOS of each respective boards to their latest, final version BIOS.Since all three boards came from the same manufacturer, we were able to use the same BIOS settings for all boards, not to mention the same drivers. This should minimize other influencing factors such as different hardware / drivers etc.Our test setup
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 and E6550 socket LGA-775
4 x 512 MB A-DATA Vitesta 5-5-5-18 PC6400 DDR2-SDRAM
2 x 1024 MB Samsung 7-7-7-20 PC8500 DDR3-SDRAM
Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro 256 MB graphics card
Gigabyte P965-DS3P Intel P965, P35-DS3P Intel P35 (DDR2) and P35-DQ6 Intel P35 (DDR3) motherboard
Hitachi Deskstar 250 GB Serial ATA 16 MB buffer 7200 rpm hard drives
LiteOn 1673S DVD-RW
FSP Epsilon 800 watts ATX/BTX power supply
Settings:
Core: 1.25 volt
DDR2: 1.9 volt (default motherboard voltage)
DDR3: 1.5 volt (default motherboard voltage)
PCI-E clock: 100 MHz
DDR clock: 800 MHz for DDR2 (except when testing E6550 with P965 - memory is synchronous with FSB)
Memory Timings: SPD except otherwise specified
As we were setting up, we found that the Gigabyte P35-DS3P we're using won't boot at all with all memory slots populated. We can see and hear fans spinning up, lights coming on but no BIOS screen. So we removed two modules and wala, the board boots and everything work properly. From experience, we usually see this kind of behaviour if the memory controller is set to use Command Rate 1T. Unfortunately, we were unable to check if P35 uses Command Rate 1T by default, however we were able to confirm that P965 does use Command Rate 2T if all slots are populated. We did update to a newer BIOS, but no dice.
Well, what's wrong with 1 GB of RAM? The problem is that you really want 2 GBs of RAM with Vista. With just 1 GB of memory, Vista downgrade memory performance of our system from 5.4 to 4.5, most likely since it has to fetch data from virtual memory / page file more often. It shouldn't be a problem with small benchmarks like Sciencemark and SuperPI whose memory usage are fairly low, but it can be a problem with games who uses more than 1 GB of memory. Though performance will not be different, we'll have to run more test to 'buffer' data in RAM. Vista's user address space problems also didn't make it any easier. This means we had to look around for some 1 GB memory modules.
Thankfully we came across a pair from TeamExtreme, on loan from a friend. One thing we noticed is that these modules are also double bank / double sided, so even we were to use four of this modules together with the P35, we'll likely experience the same problem again. Single sided memory modules usually costs extra and sometimes uses higher latency. P35 insistence on single sided modules is really disappointing, considering no such restrictions with P965. Just to be clear, we're still not sure whether or not this is the nature of the P35 or the motherboard, but we are completely sure such behaviour does not exists with P965 boards we tested. We'll have to see until our P35 motherboard round up to see whether or the board or the chipset is to blame here.
We did some test to see whether or not there are performance differences between 1 GB and 2 GB and found the difference to be so small that they can be attributed to variations between runs. We saw the same thing during testing for the article Quest for Lag Free Gaming.
Preliminary Tests
Much like our last article looking at Core 2 Duo E6300, we're going to use some synthetic benchmarks to examine the memory subsystem bandwidth and latency: SuperPi 1.1 (no mod) and Sciencemark 2.0's Membench. Keep in mind, these are only preliminary tests results, from which we're hoping to see whether or not there are differences between the two chipset (P965 and P35) with basically the same memory (and timing) and then once again with DDR3 memory modules.Here are the Core 2 Duo E6300 and E6550 processors we used today
Here are the SPD data from the A-DATA Vitesta modules
And here are the SPD data from the DDR3 Samsung modules we used in this test
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