A Lackluster Premiere: ALi Aladdin-P4 — THG.RU

Newcomer From ALi: Currently 7 Chipsets For P4

Having introduced the Aladdin-P4 chipset, the Taiwanese company ALi is the latest to join the ranks of chip manufacturers offering a chipset for the Intel Pentium 4. Up until ALi joined the pack, there had been six different chipsets for the Intel Pentium 4.

As in the past, ALi is banking on its extremely low chipset prices to help it gobble up a large market share — this is the only viable strategy, considering the manufacturer’s current position in the market. Its new chipset boasts two new essential features that set it apart from the competition: Ultra-DMA/133 for the latest hard drives and DDR333 for high-speed RAM modules. The latter feature especially has figured very prominently in much of ALi’s marketing material. However, the rather imposing name, «DDR333,» only designates a memory clock that has been jacked up to 166 MHz — currently, SDRAM and DDR-SDRAM modules are specified to run at a maximum of 133 MHz. The official goal of «DDR333» (PC2700) solely consists of performing at least as well as a system with expensive Rambus modules and an Intel 850 chipset.

Newcomer From ALi: Currently 7 Chipsets For P4, Continued

So far, so good. In our Munich lab, we ran an exhaustive test on the ALi reference board with the Aladdin-P4 chipset.

The ALi reference board with the new Aladdin-P4 chipset.

View of the connector side of the ALi reference board.

Schematic design of the Aladdin-P4 chipset. Your attention is immediately drawn to the 7 PCI slots, which no manufacturer would dream of including.

Impossible — 166 MHz Memory Clock at 100 MHz FSB Clock

The most important news is that we were unable to convince the RAM to operate at 166 MHz with an FSB clock speed of 100 MHz. Although there is a plethora of settings that can be made in BIOS, there was no option for DDR333 (100 MHz FSB/ 166 MHz RAM/ 33 MHz PCI).

We’re still hoping that when ALi modifies its BIOS, it will have a version that offers 166 MHz with default values. Because of this limitation, we had no choice but to run the test with a memory clock of 133 MHz (DDR266). However, we did set the CAS latency to 2.0, thus tweaking the board to reach maximum performance.

Despite the fact that we used what we have discovered to be the best RAM available (Micron DDR-SDRAM, 266, CL2), we could not manage to run our tests in Turbo or Ultra-2 modes. So, we performed the entire test in Fast mode and CL2.0.

The board doesn’t have any settings for a memory clock speed of 166 MHz — the BIOS tells exactly the same story.

View of the North Bridge (left) and the South Bridge of the ALi Aladdin-P4 chipset.

Comparing Chipsets For The Pentium 4

* depending on clock generator

What Awaits The P4: 133 MHz FSB In Sight?

Essentially the same thing holds for the ALi Aladdin-P4 as for all other Pentium 4 chipsets — it still remains to be seen whether the next-generation Pentium 4 with an FSB clock speed of 133 MHz will even work with today’s crop of boards, although the BIOS is generally designed as though it will. As for Intel’s renowned 850 component, there’s no question that the Pentium 4 (Northwood core) doesn’t offer any 133 MHz support. In other words, once the new Pentium 4 comes out, we should be expecting a new batch of chipsets to handle the increased FSB clock speed.

Testing Procedure and Details

Benchmarks Under Windows 2000

Because we wanted to avoid the automatic resource management feature integrated in Windows XP, we chose to use Windows 2000 to test this crop of chipsets. The only reason for picking Windows 2000 over Windows XP is that the newer version of Windows optimizes how background applications run. This new feature would have prevented us from obtaining accurate benchmarking results.

We performed a total of 17 different benchmark tests in order to obtain the most complete, well-balanced view of how each chipset performs. You can get a clear overall picture from the benchmark results for a total of 7 different platforms, all of which are intended for use with the Intel Pentium 4. We ran four different Quake 3 tests to determine OpenGL performance. The different MPEG-encoding benchmarks provide a comprehensive testing environment — the Lame MP3 Encoder was used to encode a 178 MB WAV file into MPEG-1 Layer 3 format. Still a classic, our MPEG-4 test converts a file from a commercial DVD-ROM into MPEG-4 format using Xmpeg and the Divx codec. We also created an MPEG-2 film using the video-editing software «Pinnacle Studio 7.» A regular in our list of benchmarks is determining rendering performance using Newtek’s Lightwave (version 7b). We also ran WinACE to test how well the CPU performs when archiving files, a common application in the computing world. Compiling the latest Linux kernel, 2.4.13, has long been a standard benchmark in our repertoire. The Sysmark 2001 benchmark was used to determine office performance.

OpenGL Performance: Quake 3 Arena

In the four time-demo runs of Quake 3 Arena, the ALi Aladdin P4 takes last place in the DDR-SDRAM league.

MP3 Audio Encoding: Lame MP3

The Lame MP3 Encoder under Windows XP was used to convert a 178 MB sound file from a WAV format to an MPEG-1 Layer 3 format. The diagram clearly shows that the new ALi Aladdin P4 chipset takes last place among the DDR-SDRAM chipsets. The only chipset that is slower than the ALi is the Intel 845 with SDRAM.

Video-Encoding MPEG-4: Flask Mpeg and Divx

SiSoft Sandra Benchmarks: CPU and Multimedia

The SiSoft Sandra Benchmark 2001 shows that the ALi Aladdin P4 is shaky in the area of RAM performance. However, all these results should be taken with a grain of salt. This benchmark suite is only suitable for overclockers who are interested in checking a relative improvement in performance for a particular CPU.

3D Rendering: Newtek Lightwave 7b

The Lightwave benchmark tells a completely different story — the ALi Aladdin P4 comes in fourth out of seven, just after the SiS 645 with DDR333.

Office Performance: Sysmark 2001

The ALi chipset’s performance isn’t too shabby in the Sysmark 2001 — it takes fourth place.

Compiling Linux: Suse Linux 7.3 / Kernel 2.4.13

This just beats all — when it comes to compiling the latest Linux kernel, the ALi Aladdin P4 has to admit defeat, even when ccompared to the Intel 845 with SDRAM.

Archiving: WinACE 2.04

Archiving is a very practical application. WinACE 2.04 was used under Windows XP to archive a 178 MB WAV file while the clock was running. In this discipline, the ALi chipset takes last place among the DDR candidates.

3D Rendering Performance: SPECviewperf «Lightscape»

The Lightscape benchmark tells a similar story — the ALi comes in last among the DDR-SDRAM chipsets.

MPEG-2 Video Encoding: Pinnacle Studio 7

When it came to creating an MPEG-2 film using Pinnacle Studio 7, the Intel Pentium 4/2200 was substantially faster than the AMD Athlon XP 2000+. The ALi can’t make any headway in this benchmark, either — it occupies the second to last position, just ahead of the Intel 845 with SDRAM.

Conclusion: Slowest DDR Chipset For P4

With a few exceptions, the benchmark results clearly show that the ALi Aladdin P4 chipset is currently the slowest for the Intel Pentium 4. Its weak RAM performance caused it to stick out like a sore thumb in some of the benchmark disciplines. During the test, however, the board was impressively stable day after day — the reference system didn’t crash even once.

The specifications listed in the press release and on the manufacturer’s home page turned out to be a clear-cut case of false advertising during our test — the board doesn’t have an option that allows you to run the RAM at 166 MHz, while the FSB clock speed is set at 100 MHz. These clock speed settings are necessary since the current Pentium 4 is only specified to run at 100 MHz, and Intel doesn’t plan on increasing the FSB clock speed to 133 MHz for another two or three months. It’s impossible to predict whether the ALi Aladdin P4 chipset will support the next generation of Pentium 4 processors with FSB clock speeds of 133 MHz.

No matter what else it might do, ALi ought to offer a suitable BIOS with a DDR333 option if the chipset actually supports the feature, as the ALi marketing material claims it does. One substantial feature that sets the new chipset apart from the competition is its inclusion of the fast Ultra DMA/133 mode for both IDE controllers. However, informed users will miss the USB 2.0 functionality that only the SiS 645 and the VIA P4X266A offer. A simple option would be to integrate an additional USB controller that would act as an additional PCI device.

Overall, though, the fact remains that most motherboard manufacturers have already filled out their portfolios — the ink on the contracts with their chipset suppliers has been dry for some time now. This makes things difficult for ALi — the Aladdin P4’s only selling point thus remains its price, which should be about half that of the Intel 845D.