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 | | Gaming Benchmarks | | All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy | |
ID's Quake 3 Arena:
When it comes to benchmarking, no other test is as well used, and well known, as the TIMEDEMO routine in Quake 3 Arena. Although the scores have become more and more inflated, we still use this benchmark since it produces reliable results, and can give good comparisons between like systems and components. We ran two sets of scores, one a "low quality" setup where the game was set to use a resolution of 640x480 using 16-bit color and then again at so-called "high quality", which was at 1024x768x32, a common setup for many current gamers. The scores we achieved on all boards were very high, possibly showing the age of the program, with the Abit board topping out at 334.3 frames per second. The Gigabyte board was a close second, missing out by 2 frames, with the MSI board a not so distant third. We just barely missed pushing out 400 FPS when overclocked. The "High Quality" benchmarks mirrored the previous scores for the most part. The Abit board came out on top again, although this time by a mere 0.3 frames per second (completely impossible to judge by the naked eye). The MSI board still remained in third, a full 20 frames per second behind the top two boards. When overclocked, we still managed to pump out 343.4 frames, which was better than the stock scores at 640x480x16.
Novalogic's Comanche 4 Demo: A popular DirectX benchmarking program is NovaLogic's Comanche 4. Since this benchmark is more CPU dependant than other games, we can get a good feel for the overall system performance by comparing the benchmarked results. The differences here were slight, and would not even be noticed during normal game-play. What we saw here was only a 1 frame per second difference between the lowest score (MSI) and the highest score (Gigabyte) at stock speeds. The benefits of the Abit BG7E reaching a relatively high overclock are shown here, as we saw an increase of around 8 frames per second, or approximately 17%.
Checking in with the 'Stones
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