Sandi Memory Benchmark w AMD seems low???

[Nathan G]

Biostar MB with AMD K6-2-450MHz and 64MB PC100 Ram.. FSB=100MHz.

Sandi Reports around 81 Mflps
The comparative chart shows this considerably lower than a 233 MHz Pentium class.
Is this correct? is there something wrong with system? Is benchmark not optimized for AMD?
thanks,
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[deep_sky]

i have comparitively the same system as you do and i get really lousy results. if you look at the faq on the sandra site, it does say that amd chips are built in such a way that there is a bottleneck in the memory and thus the numbers reported are low....

[daveleau]

I have an AMD and was a bit ticked off when I saw the reasons for the bottleneck (L2 cache speed is the culprit) but when I ran another benching program, it did nto have the same bottleneck (wintune). Wintune has its own problems though in benchmarking so...

[lost1]

It might be your mobo or some other component, as I haven't heard of any other K6-2's with this problem running Sandra. For comparson, I have a K62-450 on a SOYO 5EMA+ board w/128Mb PC100, & Sandra says:

1285 MIPS
543 MFLOPS

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[deep_sky]

lost1...
that sounds like the cpu benchmarks which are as they should be on my machine (most of the time)....we're talking the memory benchmarks which say my system is worse than a winchip 266 (which I find hard to believe no matter what mobo i have)..its the memory and how it communicates with the cpu is the problem...

[Axel]

Different benchmarking programs do different types of testing.

The AMD chips of old before the latest AMD release were notoriously slow for floating point calculations. A bench-mark program that scans for the return speed of a result from a floating point calculation will come back with a different result than programs that use some other means of calibration. Same thing for Cyrix chips. Until the latest AMD came out, Intel had the corner on the market for floating point calculations. Now AMD, a few of the latest Motorola chips, and the IBM copper chip are giving Intel a run for their money and beating them.

Lastly, AMD's calculation speed is impacted by system heat. A nice cold chip will run faster and longer than a warm chip will. There was an interesting article on this board about a water cooling system for the AMD PC chip.

Don't get me wrong - AMD makes a very reliable and compatable chip - I use them myself - but know what you're buying.

[lost1]

Ooopps!
Now you know why they call me the Lost one...

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