Introduction

Savage 2000 party?

Over a week ago we received an invitation to what can be described as an S3 Savage2000 benchmarking party. The "invitation invited members of the press to an "exclusive pre-comdex showing of S3's multimedia innovations."

Oh well, just another "look but don't touch" technology demonstration -or so we thought. While reading down the activities list, we found these two lines: "Run benchmarks on the new products" and "Booze and schmooze with the new S3/Diamond team." Woohoo! Benchmarks and an open bar! Drunken benchmarking anyone? It's time to visit S3 again.

For Your Eyes Only

For some reason, I didn't really expect the party to be, well, a party. Maybe it was the 4-7PM timeframe for the event and the fact that it was just a gathering of technology journalists, S3/Diamond engineers, and PR/marketing people (To make sure the engineers don't spill anything important.).

When I arrived at the party, I found out that the "FOR YOUR EYES ONLY" meant that the event was going to have a James Bond theme. (Which I would have known had I taken the time to view the Power Point invitation file.) Of course, the S3 "Bond girls" didn't bother me at all. I have absolutely no problem with beautiful women in black cocktail dresses offering me hors d'oeuvres and alcohol.

S3 had about twelve AMD Athlon 600 and two Pentium 3 600 systems setup at the party. Half were dedicated to Quake 3 gaming, and the other half were for open benchmarking. Representatives from Futuremark and Faroudja Laboratories were also present demonstrating their new software. I'm not allowed to say much about the new products yet, but the demonstrations were very impressive.

Read on to see the benchmarks, find out how I did in the Quake 3 tournament, and find out why my nickname is now "[OwN]TooL."