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I've been flooded with requests to show more "realistic" system setups and even though we've decided a while back to use a 1 GHz part to isolate the graphics card analysis, I've squeezed in a few tests to compare a slower clocked 500 MHz PIII system with our reference platform. I figured that a $120 PIII 500E was a very reasonable, low-cost processor.
You can clearly see that the slower CPU does have a greater affect on the framerate at the 800x600 and below resolutions. I would consider this loss minor and note that at the upper resolutions, the CPU means nearly nothing. This is a huge reason why we've decided to remove lower resolutions from our high-end benchmark testing.
Putting greater stress on the graphics card with greater color depth and detail, the PIII 500 hinders the performance at our lowest resolution test. Above that, the slower CPU provided numbers just as good as our expensive rig.
