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Gaming Benchmarks |
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Have you heard of a little test we like to
call Quake3? |
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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
1024x768x32, a common setup for many current gamers.
While these
numbers are indeed inflated with frame rates in the 300's,
we can still notice a breakdown in the overall experience.
The VIA P4PB and the MSI 845PE boards are evenly matched,
both trailing the apparent king, the Gigabyte 8PE667.
Raising the memory speed on the VIA board, lowers the frame
rate by just over 15 frames per second. While this
would truly be almost unnoticeable at these speeds, it still
makes a point as to the lost performance when using DDR400.
Overclocking boosted the frame-rates by a clean 30fps.
The "High
Quality" benchmarks followed suit, with the two lower scores
having a difference of only 0.2 frames while trailing the
leader by more than 10. The DDR400 score dropped off
the DDR333 score by 12 frames, equating to a 4 percent
decrease. Overclocked, the VIA board pumped out an
additional 20 frames per second, although this amounted to
only 11 frames more than the Gigabyte board did, which was
at stock speed for the FSB.
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,
the scores seem lower than what one usually expects from
this benchmark However, we can get a good feel for the
overall system performance by comparing the results.
The scores at
stock speeds using DDR333 memory, were all within one frame
of each other, and ended up Gigabyte, VIA, and MSI, in that
order. Obviously, 1 frame isn't much to dwell on, and
all three boards would definitely be worthwhile for gaming.
The now familiar drop-off when using DDR400, cost the VIA
P4PB Ultra system 2 frames per second, compared to when
using DDR333. Finally, overclocking to 150MHz FSB,
picked up an additional 5 frames per second, an increase of
11%.
Final
benchmark routines and the Conclusion
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