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Test Setup

There are several things that we changed since our last CPU article. The most important change is the upgraded graphics card. Instead of the GeForce FX 5900 Pro we used ATI's Radeon 9800XT, since this is the faster consumer graphics chip. Please take a quick look at the test setup table below.

We constantly try to obtain the fastest memory available on the market. In the case of the Pentium system we used four 256 MB Corsair DIMMs that can altogether be run at excellent timings (2-2-2-6). All other systems were equipped with two 512 MB DIMMs with marginally longer timings (2-3-2-6, there are no faster 512 MB DIMMs available) for different technical reasons: Our AthlonXP and 64 platforms do not support four DIMMs and Athlon64 FX requires registered DDR memory. We tried to run all three systems at accelerated 2-2-2-6 timings, but both the AthlonXP and the Athlon64 did not work reliably and the Athlon64 FX does not allow the memory timings to be altered.