Systemax Wildcat AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 SLI Gaming PC

by Jeff Bouton — Wednesday, July 19, 2006, 12:01 PM EDT

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Performance Comparisons with Quake 4 and F.E.A.R.

Performance Comparisons with Quake 4

OpenGL Quad-Damage

Quake 4

id Software, in conjunction with developer Raven, recently released the latest addition to the wildly popular Quake franchise, Quake 4. Quake 4 is based upon an updated and slightly modified version of the Doom 3 engine, and as such performance characteristics between the two titles are very similar. Like Doom 3, Quake 4 is also an OpenGL game that uses extremely high-detailed textures and a ton of dynamic lighting and shadows, but unlike Doom3, Quake 4 features some outdoor environments as well. We ran this Quake 4 benchmark using a custom timedemo with the game set to its "High-Quality" mode at a resolution of 1600 x 1200 with 4X AA and 16X aniso enabled simultaneously.

In our custom Quake 4 benchmark, the Voodoo Omen using Radeon 1900 XTs in Crossfire mode trailed the Systemax Wildcat by 24 FPS. Our custom Athlon 64 FX-60 test bed running GeForce 7900 GTXs in SLI mode also trailed the Wildcat, although by a lower margin of 4.5 FPS. Most notable was the Core 2 Duo E6700 Performance which was only slightly faster than the Systemax Wildcat, leading by 1.3 FPS overall.

Performance Comparisons with F.E.A.R

More Info: http://www.whatisfear.com/us/

F.E.A.R

One of the most highly anticipated titles of 2005 was Monolith's paranormal thriller F.E.A.R. Taking a look at the minimum system requirements, we see that you will need at least a 1.7GHz Pentium 4 with 512MB of system memory and a 64MB graphics card, that is a Radeon 9000 or GeForce4 Ti-class or better, to adequately run the game. Using the full retail release of the game patched to v1.03, we put the graphics cards in this review through their paces to see how they fared with a popular title. Here, all graphics settings within the game were set to the maximum values, but with soft shadows disabled (Soft shadows and anti-aliasing do not work together currently). Benchmark runs were then completed at a resolution 1600x1200, with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled.

We wrap up our benchmarks with F.E.A.R., where the results were relatively even when comparing the various hardware configurations. In this case, the Systemax Wildcat ranked third behind our Athlon 64 FX-60 SLI based system, by 3 FPS, and the Core 2 Duo E6700 SLI test bed, by 13 FPS. Neither of the ATI powered FX-60 based machines came close to the Wildcat in this test, however.