ATi RADEON XPRESS 200 Series: AMD Platform Chipsets

For our next round of synthetic benchmarks, we ran the CPU and Memory performance modules built into Futuremark's PCMark04.  For those interested in more than just the graphs, we've got a couple of quotes directly from Futuremark that explain exactly what these tests do and how they work.

Futuremark PCMark04 More Synthetic CPU and Memory Benchmarks

"The CPU test suite is a collection of tests that are run to isolate the performance of the CPU. There are nine tests in all. Two pairs of tests are run multithreaded - each test in the pair is run in its own thread.  The remaining five tests are run single threaded. These tests include such functions as file encryption, decryption, compression and decompression, grammar check, audio conversion, WMV and DivX video compression."

"The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing."

Whether or not the IGP is used, the RADEON XPRESS 200 fares very well against a similar configured nForce 3 Ultra based system.  PCMark04's CPU performance module showed all four of the AMD powered systems performing within a fraction of one another.  As we saw in the SANDRA test, there was some variation on the memory performance module.  With a discreet graphics card installed, the RADEON XPRESS 200 fell just shy of the nForce 3 based systems, but when using the IGP it fell about 150 points behind.