Heir To The BX: 18 Pentium III Motherboards Using The 815 Chipset

Direct 3D Benchmark: Expendable Timedemo

The chart contains two graphs each: The yellow is the standard benchmark result as we always get it, the green is the result with on-board sound enabled. As you can see, a PCI sound chip is absolutely no help in terms of performance. E.g. the Gigabyte board comes with a Creative chip, but the game performance is not clearly better than with the AC97 solutions of most competitors. The Asus board does not have a sound system, that's why the blue graph is missing.

Again we find very small performance differences. The difference between the fastest and the slowest board is approximately 3 fps. That changes as soon as you enable the sound system. Here, the difference is up to 8 fps.

Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.