After Hours Benchmarking

Late night

By the time I returned downstairs, it was around 7PM and the party was winding down, but I still didn't have my benchmark numbers yet (By this time someone had rebooted the systems I crashed). Thankfully, I had a small army of S3 engineers and marketing people watching over my shoulder as I ran the benchmarks. All the other guests had left, so I had them all to myself. (BTW, benchmarking is pretty hard to do when you're trying to carry on a conversation at the same time.) We spent the next two hours benchmarking and talking (mostly talking). Eventually, everyone went home and someone turned off the lights. I left for Berkeley a little after 9PM.

Special thanks to Dustin "[OwN]DustmaN", James "Coco ThePoolBoy," and Stacey Long for staying late and helping this FS hardware editor get his benchmarks.

System Setups

Pentium 3 600
Intel i820 Motherboard
128MB RDRAM
Fujitsu 7200RPM HD
Viper II Savage 2000 (125/155) video card

Athlon 600
Gigabyte GA-71X Motherboard
128MB SDRAM
Unknown HD
Viper II Savage 2000 (125/155) video card

Benchmarks

Q3Test 1.08 - 640x480 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Q3Test 1.08 - 800x600 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Q3Test 1.08 - 1024x768 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Q3Test 1.08 - 1600x1200 Fastest, Normal, High Quality

Notes

The drivers were still in beta, and we encountered some minor benchmarking problems in 3DMark. As a result we're only going to put out Quake 3 numbers for now. We're including our GeForce and TNT2U numbers for a rough comparison. Keep in mind that the components in our test systems are different from the components S3's benchmark machines.