The platform I tested was a Gigabyte 7IX revision 1.1 motherboard. This motherboard was outfitted with AMD's super bypass capable north bridge (AMD 751). Gigabyte isn't the only manufacturer shipping this new north bridge; other Athlon motherboard manufacturers are shipping it as well. The Gigabyte board looked like a typical production 7IX motherboard. I am told that the newer north bridges are already being shipped on motherboards. Here's a picture of the Gigabyte 7IX platform I used.

To get an idea of the performance impact with some typical business applications I used SYSmark98 and tested it under Windows 98 and NT 4.0. 3D games are probably some of the most CPU intensive applications. Although business application performance is important, most of its time is spent waiting for hard disk and not the CPU. Gaming however is very critical to CPU and video performance. If there isn't enough horsepower the game play is critically affected. To exercise the impact that super bypass has on gaming I chose a large suite of 3D applications.

All of the charts are setup the same way. The red lines indicate super bypass is enabled or on. While the green lines indicate that super bypass is disabled or off. Each test was ran on both a 750MHz and 800MHz Athlon.