System Setup

System Setup

AMD Athlon 64 FX-53
AMD Athlon 64 FX-51
AMD Athlon 64 3400+
Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz Extreme Edition (800MHz bus)

ASUS SK8N Socket 940 nForce3 150 Motherboard
Gigabyte K8VNXP Socket 754 K8T800 Motherboard
ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe Socket 478 875P Motherboard

1GB Mushkin Registered ECC 2-3-2 PC3200 DDR Memory (2x512MB)
1GB Corsair Pro Series 3-4-4 PC4000 DDR Memory (2x512MB)

GeForce FX 5950 Ultra 256MB
Detonator 56.56

34GB Western Digital Raptor (10,000RPM, 8MB cache)

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1

DirectX 9.0b

Desktop resolution 1024x768, 32-bit color, 85Hz 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

PC Magazine Business Winstone 2004
PC Magazine Content Creation Winstone 2004
SiSoft Sandra 2004
Futuremark PCMark04
Futuremark 3D Mark03 v.340
Novalogic Comanche 4
Square Enix Final Fantasy XI Benchmark 2
Epic Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo
Epic Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo
Ubisoft IL2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles
id Software Quake III v.1.32
Yeti Studios Gun Metal Demo

Lab Notes

You’ll notice that we used the Detonator 55 56.56 driver set, which was the most recent at the time of our testing. Since then, NVIDIA has released the 56.64 driver, which boasts the same general feature set, but is reported to fix a bug NVIDIA discovered in the Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo. At this point, we’ve still not encountered the bug in question, and all Unreal Tournament 2004 testing should be representative of game play using the new driver.