Benchmarks Part 2

I decided to forgo Mad Onion's 3DMark and Bapco's SysMark as they do not make use of SMP. I confirmed this later when I ran the 3DMark2001 demo in a loop along with the two instances of Prime95 that were torture-testing the system: 3DMark only accessed CPU 0, setting the instance of Prime95 devoted to that CPU several tests behind the other.

On to the Winstone tests. At default BIOS settings, the VP6 scored 43.8 on High-End Winstone99. Overclocked to 846MHz with a 141 FSB(this was the highest speed at which I could boot into Windows), it got a 46. Here is how those numbers break down:

Naturally, the Winstone99 Dual-Processor Inspection tests were crucial here. At spec, the VP6 scored a 4.46. At 846/141, it got a 4.66. Those scores break down as follows:

These results are actually slightly better than I expected to see, especially the Photoshop section. The strange thing is that Winstone consistently reported that very test as "failed," but then proceeded to report a score for it. The results here are from the first run of each test, though all Winstone tests were conducted three to five times each. There was a certain degree of variance, but these number are representative.

As part of the license agreement for the Winstone tests, I cannot compare these results with those from earlier versions of the tests. Since I'm not 100% certain which version I used when testing my old BP6 with 433MHz Celerons, I will play it safe and leave those numbers out for now. (Suffice it to say that they show the VP6 in a very favorable light.) I will however be rigging the ol' girl back up here in a few days and running this same version of these tests on her. That information will be included in an update.

Finally came the Quake III Timedemo tests. I was pretty excited about this, as Quake III is just about the only game that makes use of SMP. I had seen my framerates go up about 10% on my BP6 when I typed in "r_smp 1" at in the command line. Granted, that 10% hadn't been much with dual Celeron 433s and a TNT2 Ultra AGP card, but with PIII 800s and a GeForce2 MX, I was hoping to see something significant. (The numbers here are all from the "Normal" graphics settings.)

Everything started out just fine: at default speeds, I was getting 122 frames/second for both Timedemo 1 and 2. When overclocked to 846/141, that figure nudged up to 128. Then came the disappointing part: as soon as I enabled SMP, I actually saw my framerates go down 10%! And it gets even worse: over half the time when I attempted to launch Quake III with SMP enabled (and only with SMP enabled), the system would hang. This happened whether the CPUs were overclocked or not. In other words, if you're thinking that the VP6 is going to give you that extra edge in Quake III, don't get your hopes up.