Read our lips: DDR333
In our Athlon XP 2100+ review, we used DDR266 memory (aka PC2100) in our P4 and Athlon XP test rigs. At the time, we weren't entirely happy with not having DDR333 results, so we made you all a promise:

We're testing with familiar motherboards and memory types here, because they represent what's most widely available right now for the Pentium 4 and Athlon XP. Both processors would probably get a bit of a performance boost with DDR333 memory, and we'll test that next time around, we promise.

Now is the time when I capitulate to the Democrats in Congress and give you: DDR266 instead. Thing is, we weren't entirely happy with the performance of the SiS 645 chipset's AGP implementation after some concerns raised [h]ere, and we found that the Shuttle AK35GTR mobo (based on the VIA KT266A) is just as fast as the KT333 boards we had available. So we decided to test both the Intel and AMD processors on their top-selling platforms, the 845 and KT266A chipsets, respectively. We also threw in an RDRAM configuration, because Intel has long claimed that RDRAM would become more and more necessary as processor speeds ramped.

I'm sure I'll pay for this at the polls, but it had to be done.

Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least twice, and the results were averaged.

Our test systems were configured like so:

Remember that the Pentium 4 2.0'A'GHz is a Northwood chip with 512K L2 cache, while the 2.0GHz variant is the older Willamette core with 256K of L2 cache.

The test systems' Windows desktops were set at 1024x768 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

• SiSoft Sandra Standard 2002
• Compiled binary of C Linpack port from Ace's Hardware
• ZD Media Business Winstone 2001 1.0.2
• ZD Media Content Creation Winstone 2001 1.0.2
• ZD Media Content Creation Winstone 2002 1.0
• POV-Ray for Windows version 3.1g (multiple compiles)
• Sphinx 3.3
• ScienceMark 1.0
• LAME 3.91
• MadOnion 3DMark 2001 SE
• Comanche 4 demo benchmark
• Quake III Arena 1.30
• Serious Sam SE v1.05

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.