System Setup

System Setup

AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (333MHz)

ASUS A7N8X Deluxe nForce2 Motherboard
ASUS A7V8X KT400 Motherboard

512MB Corsair XMS3200 CAS2 Memory

NVIDIA Reference GeForce4 Ti 4600 128MB
Detonator Driver 40.72

30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA-100 Hard Drive

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1

DirectX 8.1

Desktop resolution 1024x768, 32-bit color, 75Hz refresh

All power saving options were turned off, as were the Automatic Update and System Restore services. Graphics options under the ‘Performance’ tab were all disabled for maximum performance.

Benchmarks

Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo
3D Mark 2001 Second Edition Build 330 – 32-bit color
Quake III: Arena version 1.17 ‘Demo001’ demo
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter – 32-bit color, Elephant Atrium demo
Jedi Knight II v.1.04
Comanche 4
SiSoft Sandra 2003 Memory Bandwidth Benchmark

Lab Notes

Our graphics card of choice for this platform review was an ATI RADEON 9700 Pro. We experienced problems getting the card to work properly on the KT400 board at 333MHz, though (266MHz front side bus speeds worked fine), even with the latest BIOS and board revision 1.04. Instead, we opted for the reference GeForce4 Ti 4600. Even the GeForce4 card experienced stability issues, which were fixed after we turned off Fast Writes in the BIOS.

Irregardless of platform, we encountered some texturing anomalies in Serious Sam SE using NVIDIA’s latest 40.72 WHQL drivers.

In testing the DualDDR architecture, we put one memory module in the first DIMM slot and one in the third. In order to test a single 64-bit channel, the modules were installed in the first and second slots. All tests are performed on a 333MHz CAS2 synchronous memory bus unless otherwise specified.