Benchmarking
Setup
Hardware
| CPU(s) |
AMD
Duron 800 @ 800 MHz
|
| Heatsink
& Fan |
3dfxCOOL
Socket A-HO Fan
|
| Motherboard(s) |
Azza
KT133BX
|
| Memory |
128 MB Micron PC100 Cas2 SDRAM
|
| Hard
Drive(s) |
Western
Digital 25 GB ATA66
|
|
CD-ROM |
EPO
50x
|
| Sound
Card |
On
board 3D Surround (AC97 Codec)
|
| Video
Card |
Absolute
Multimedia Outrageous GeForce2 GTS
|
Software
| Operating
System |
Windows
Me
|
| Video
/ VIA Drivers |
nVidia 6.31 final release
|
| |
Benchmarking
Applications |
| OpenGL |
Quake
III Arena v1.25
|
| DirectX |
Microsoft
DirectX 7.1
|
| Other |
Madonion
3DMark 2000 v1.1., ZDCPUmark 99, Sisoft Sandra 2000
|
While these benchmarking
applications are great for getting performance numbers from a setup they don't
tell the whole story. I'll always take a board that had slightly lower than
the best results in the benchmarking applications as long as it had more inherent
stability. Stability is a by-product of good design so you can't say enough
about a board that is stable. To test stability, and further stress the board,
I had RC5 running in the background continuously after the initial benchmarks
were completed. For those of you out there that are wondering why I didn't
use the beta 6.35 drivers for benchmarking let me break it down to this: while
using the very latest available drivers for a video card review isn't a bad
idea, I wanted to use the latest set of certified drivers to ensure any problems
that popped up weren't driver related.
The Duron CPU came straight
from AMD. Since it was just released last
week it shows what is possible with AMD's "value" CPU.
