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Gaming Benchmarks |
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All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy |
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ID's Quake 3 Arena:
When it comes to benchmarking,
no other test is as well used, and well known, as the TIMEDEMO
routine in Quake 3 Arena. Although the scores have
become more and more inflated, we still use this benchmark
since it produces reliable results, and can give good
comparisons between like systems and components. We
ran two sets of scores, one a "low quality" setup where the
game was set to use a resolution of 640x480 using 16-bit
color and then again at so-called "high quality", which was
at 1024x768x32, a common setup for many current gamers.
The scores we achieved on all
boards were very high, possibly showing the age of the
program, with the Abit board topping out at 334.3 frames per
second. The Gigabyte board was a close second, missing
out by 2 frames, with the MSI board a not so distant third.
We just barely missed pushing out 400 FPS when overclocked.
The "High Quality" benchmarks
mirrored the previous scores for the most part. The
Abit board came out on top again, although this time by a
mere 0.3 frames per second (completely impossible to judge
by the naked eye). The MSI board still remained in
third, a full 20 frames per second behind the top two
boards. When overclocked, we still managed to pump out
343.4 frames, which was better than the stock scores at
640x480x16.
Novalogic's
Comanche 4 Demo:
A popular DirectX benchmarking
program is NovaLogic's Comanche 4. Since this benchmark is
more CPU dependant than other games, we can get a good feel
for the overall system performance by comparing the
benchmarked results.
The differences here were
slight, and would not even be noticed during normal game-play.
What we saw here was only a 1 frame per second difference
between the lowest score (MSI) and the highest score
(Gigabyte) at stock speeds. The benefits of the Abit
BG7E
reaching a relatively high overclock are shown here, as we
saw an increase of around 8 frames per second, or
approximately 17%.
Checking in with the
'Stones
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