Introduction

Ealier this month we took a look at the GeForce4 on a high end AMD Athlon XP processor. While this article was very informative for those of you who insist on having the latest and greatest hardware, gamers with older processors were left wondering how significant of an impact a video card upgrade would bring to their gaming experience. For those gamers, today we've taken a look at the GeForce4 with older Pentium III-equipped systems at 700MHz and 1GHz. End users with anything below 600MHz should probably consider a processor upgrade as their top priority for the most enjoyable gaming experience. Later this week we'll be taking a look at the performance of the GeForce4 with older "Thunderbird" Athlon processors.

Test System Setup

Intel Pentium III 700E
Intel Pentium III 1.0GHz

ABIT SH6 motherboard

256MB Corsair PC133 SDRAM

NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 reference board
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 460 reference board
NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 reference board
NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 reference board
NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti reference board
Driver version Detonator 27.30

30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive
AFREEY 12X DVD-ROM
Windows XP Professional

DirectX 8.1

Desktop resolution: 1024x768x32

Benchmarks

3DMark 2001
Quake 3 Retail - High Quality
Serious Sam Retail - Normal (32-bit)
Castle Wolfenstein MP Test no compressed textures, (32-bit)