Performance
I tested the 85DRS2 in a variety of synthetic and real-world benchmarking programs. These include SiSoft Sandra 2002, 3DMark2001 SE, Quake III Arena, Content Creation Winstone 2001 and Business Winstone 2001. All tests were run at default settings, except Quake 3 Arena, which was run at 640x480 16-bit colour to reduce stress on the video card and put more reliance on the motherboard. To put the results into perspective, I compared them to a DFI NS70-EL (SiS645DX) and an Abit BD7-RAID (i845D). The SiS645DX chipset is a later revision of the SiS645, however, the only changes that were made was added ATA133 and 533MHz bus support for the soon to be released 533MHz bus Pentium 4.

Test System
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 2GHz (20x100)
Motherboard: Soltek 85DRS2, DFI NS70-EL (SiS645DX), Abit BD7-RAID (i845D)
Memory: Kingmax 256MB DDR333, Mushkin 256MB DDR266
Video Card: Prolink Pixelview GeForce3
Sound Card: Creative Soundblaster Audigy Platinum eX
Hard Disk: Quantum Fireball Plus LM 15GB ATA100
Operating System: Windows 2000 Professional SP2
Drivers: nVidia DetonatorXP v23.11, DirectX 8.1
Software Used: SiSoft Sandra 2002, 3DMark2001 SE, Quake III Arena, Content Creation Winstone 2001, Business Winstone 2001

Chipset Performance
I wanted to run a couple of benchmarks with both systems using 266MHz memory. This will give us an idea of any speed gains specific to the chipset itself. For the remaining benchmarks after this section, the Abit BD7-RAID was tested with DDR266 memory, while the SiS645/DX boards were tested with DDR333 memory. This is because the BD7, based on i845D, does not officially support DDR333 memory - to run 166MHz memory on it would mean overclocking your system. It would be unfair to compare overclocked BD7 results to the rest of the boards, which is why I tested all three boards as they came straight out of the box. Please note this when viewing the benchmark results.

As you can see, the performance different is quiet small when all three boards are running at the same memory speed. What can you conclude from this? Well put simply, it is not worth upgrading to a SiS645 board if you already own an i845D board as you will not notice a real-world performance difference. If you're upgrading from an older system or building a P4 for the first time, an SiS645-based board gives you an advantage in the form of DDR333 support. How much difference that faster memory makes we will see in the remaining benchmarks.

Gaming Benchmarks
To get a good mix of OpenGL and Direct3D performance, we tested the boards using both Quake 3 Arena (OpenGL) and 3DMark2001 SE (Direct3D). As mentioned earlier, Quake 3 Arena was run at 640x480x16, while 3DMark2001 SE was run at default settings (1024x768x32).

In both benchmarks we see the BD7-RAID slightly trailing behind the SiS645 and SiS645DX boards. This indicates the extra memory bandwidth of DDR333 on the SiS645-based motherboards is something the P4 can take advantage of. As expected, the difference between the SiS645 and SiS645DX boards is not much and you will not notice any real-world difference between the two.

Synthetic Benchmarks
Next up are the synthetic benchmarks. SiSoft Sandra is an excellent little program that is used to evaluate different subsystems of your PC. In this review, we tested the boards using Sandra's CPU and Memory benchmarks.

In the CPU benchmark we see all three boards performing virtually identically, as we'd expect. However, in the memory benchmark the SiS645/DX boards pull out in front of the Abit BD7-RAID. This of course is due to the SiS645 variants supporting DDR333 memory and using it in these benchmarks.

Application Benchmarks
In this category we chose two benchmarking programs from Ziff Davis. These are called Business Winstone 2001 and Content Creation Winstone 2001. Both of these use real world programs to test your PC, with Business Winstone using word processing, spreadsheet and presentation application programs such as Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and Content Creation Winstone using image manipulating programs such as Photoshop and Dream Weaver.

Here we see the same results as we did in the SiSoft Sandra benchmarks, with the Soltek 85DRS2 and DFI NS70-EL pulling slightly ahead of the Abit BD7-RAID. The only difference is that this time the performance difference isn't as large as it was with the other benchmarks.

In all benchmarks we see the same basic trend. The SiS645DX and SiS645 boards pull slightly ahead of the i845D based board. This is mainly due to the fact that the SiS645-based boards are using DDR333 memory while the i845D board only supports DDR266. It is also interesting to see that the A2 revision SiS645 doesn't offer any performance gains over the SiS645DX.