System Setup

Test System Setup

AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1224MHz
AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1100MHz
Intel Pentium III 1067MHz
Intel Pentium III 1000MHz

ABIT KT7-RAID motherboard
VIA 4-in-1 ver 4.24
ABIT BE6-II motherboard

128MB PC133 CAS2 SDRAM

GeForce 2 Ultra (250/460) reference card
GeForce 2 Ultra overclocked to 290/500
Detonator 6.18 video driver

Western Digital Caviar 20GB ATA-66 Hard Drive for BE6-II system
IBM Deskstar 75GXP 15GB Hard Drive for KT7-RAID system
Windows 98 SE

Benchmarks

Winbench 99 1.1
CPUMark99
FPUMark
Business Disk Winmarks
High-End Disk Winmarks

SiSoft Sandra 2000 CPU tests - Dhrystone, Whetstone, MMX, SSE, HD, CPU/memory, FPU/memory tests

Content Creation 2000

3DMark2000

Quake 3 Retail - 510x384 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 640x480 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 800x600 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 1024x768 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 1280x960 Fastest, Normal, High Quality

MDK2 - 640x480x32
MDK2 - 800x600x32
MDK2 - 1024x768x32
MDK2 - 1280x1024x32

Notes

As we mentioned in the introduction, we've grabbed the fastest motherboard/video card combinations we've got to go along with our AMD and Intel CPUs. Once we had the components installed, we overclocked them for even more performance!

Normally we kick things off with synthetic benchmarks, but for this article lets go straight to the meat of the tests -- Quake 3 Arena!