Test Bed

• AMD 1.4GHz Thunderbird

• Soyo SY-K7V Dragon mainboard

• Enermax 431watt PSU

• 256MB Crucial PC2100 DDR RAM

• 13.6gb Maxtor 7200rpm ATA66 HDD

Our test benchmarking suite consists of 3D Mark 2001, Quake3, Serious Sam, and Vulpine's GL Mark.  All the benches listed are the average of no fewer than three runs of each respective benchmark.  First the Mad Onion bench.   

Something about seeing a 7k 3D Mark score can really make your day.  The 3D Mark benches made the largest impression on me.  We opened up this review discussing Duke Nukem and unrealized effects.  Prior to having the ASUS V8200 show up on our door we were running a plain Jane GeForce2 GTS.  There are a lot of those boards still out there and for good reason, they remain solid performers.  Anyway, there are several benches within 3D Mark that say no hardware support or something like that for slightly older cards.  The hardware support opened up some doors.  The green wind blown fields of deep overgrowth with the fisherman and pond never made an appearance before today with our old GF2.  And never mind the Lavaman floating on the Q-Bert like room or the deep ocean swells that are breathtaking.  I can't wait until I start seeing games taking advantage of the GeForce3's technology.

The Serious Sam "Dunes" demo tests a video cards performance as opposed to a complete system.  We ran it with the "speed" and "quality" settings and only changed the resolution and color depth to try a provide a good spectrum.

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