System Setup

System Setup

Intel Pentium 4 3.46GHz Extreme Edition (1066MHz bus)
Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz Extreme Edition (800MHz bus)
Intel Pentium 4 560 (3.6GHz; 90nm; 1MB L2)
Intel Pentium 4 550 (3.4GHz; 90nm; 1MB L2)
AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 (939)
AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 (939)
AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (939)
AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (939)

Intel D925XECV2 925XE Motherboard
Intel D925XCV 925E Motherboard
MSI 7025E nForce3 Ultra Socket 939 Motherboard

1GB Corsair 2-2-2-5 DDR400 Pro Series Memory (2x512MB)
1GB Corsair 3-3-3-8 DDR2-533 Pro Series Memory (2x512MB)

NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra AGP 8x
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra PCI Express x16
Detonator 66.81 Beta with support for PCI Express cards

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

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2

DirectX 9.0c

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.

Note also that extremely low latency memory modules were used for both platforms. The AMD64 system used 1T command rates, while the Pentium 4 machine employed 2T command rates.

Note also that we’ve dropped both Futuremark benchmarks from our suite. It’s difficult to defend the use of a synthetic test that contradicts 100 percent of the real-world metrics to which it’s compared, and both PCMark04 and 3DMark05 did just that, limiting their usefulness as synthetic tests.

Benchmarks

PC Magazine Business Winstone 2004 v.1.0.1
PC Magazine Content Creation Winstone 2004 v.1.0.1
SiSoft Sandra 2004 SP2
Epic Games Unreal Tournament 2004 v.3323
Id Software Doom 3
Crytek Far Cry v.1.1
Valve Software Counter-Strike: Source