VIA Apollo Pro 266: The P3 gets DDR

Business Winstone 2001 is a good example of the limitations of disk I/O performance in today's systems. While the 2001 version of the business level benchmark is bottlenecked much less than the older versions were, it is still a factor. After that, obviously L2 cache and memory performance come into play but since we aren't dealing with any extremely bandwidth intensive benchmarks DDR SDRAM isn't really given an opportunity to shine.

In this case, the Apollo Pro 266 is penalized twice. First, as we just mentioned, because the benchmark isn't very memory bandwidth intensive and second because of the inability of the Pentium III processor to actually take much advantage of the added memory bandwidth.

The performance the Apollo Pro 266 is capable of offering is very close to that of the i815E which does have a much more mature memory controller as well as more mature motherboard designs to support it.

Content Creation Winstone 2001 is more of a memory bandwidth hog than its business performance counterpart, however it is still far from demanding the 2.1GB/s of available memory bandwidth the Pro 266 can offer. This unfortunately will be the case for quite a few of today's users since this particular benchmark does test performance in a manner similar to the way many use their systems. For more information on the tests run, have a look at our quick description here.