Memory performance
Here's the main event, in many ways, because our synthetic memory tests will show just how much advantage the 875P's fast system bus and memory channels can give it. We'll start off with SiSoft's Sandra, which pumps absolutely as much data as possible through a memory subsystem.

The 875P runs away with it, delivering 1.5GB/s more bandwidth than its closest competitor. Behind it, the other dual-channel Pentium 4 chipsets are very closely matched.

Let's see if cachemem, which is a little more conservative, tells a similar story.

The 875P's lead narrows a little in cachemem's bandwidth tests, but its overall combination of read speeds and write speeds is clearly the best.

Now for memory latency, which is another key to memory performance.

The 875P is fastest again, but not by much. The graph above, however, is just a sample of the latency data cachemem collects. Let's look at it in more depth.