The Testbed
First of all I would like to apologize that we did not use Windows NT. This OS has just become obsolete for reviewers, although I appreciate that many are still using it. Windows2000 on the other hand is very young and the support for it isn't quite that mature yet. Thus I decided to focus on Windows98-testing, which should anyway give reliable performance data that can be transferred over to WinNT and Win2k.
Our test-suite consisted of the new BAPCo Sysmark2000 for office application performance evaluation, the two OpenGL-games Quake 2 and Quake 3 Arena, two 3D-games running under Direct3D, Expendable and Unreal Tournament and finally some OpenGL workstation stuff tested with SPECviewperf. The test 3D-card was a GeForce DDR reference board as usual.
| Platform Information | |
|---|---|
| VIA Apollo Pro 133A Chipset | |
| Motherboard | Asus P3V4X, ACPI BIOS 1002 beta 02, February 2000 |
| Memory | 128 MB, Micron PC133 CAS2 |
| Network | 3Com 3C905B-TX |
| Intel 820 Chipset | |
| Motherboard | Asus P3C-L, ACPI BIOS 1020 beta 03, February 2000 |
| RDRAM Memory | 128 MB, Samsung PC800 DIMM |
| SDRAM Memory | 128 MB, Micron PC133 CAS2 on Asus DIMM RiserII card with integrated MTH i82805A |
| Network | onboard Intel 82559 |
| Processor for all systems | Intel Pentium III 800/133 |
| Hard Drive for all systems | Seagate Barracuda ATA ST320430A |
| Driver Information | |
| NVIDIA GeForce 256 | 4.12.01.0368, 'fast writes' disabled to improve performance120 MHz Core, 300 MHz DDR-RAM 32 MB |
| ATA Driver | VIA Bus Master Driver 2.1.47 (4in1 4.20)Intel Ultra ATA BM driver v5.00.038 |
| Environment Settings | |
| OS Versions | Windows 98 SE 4.10.2222 AScreen Resolution 1024x768x16x85Screen Resolution 1280x1024x32x85 for SPECviewperf |
| DirectX Version | 7.0 |
| Quake 2 | Version 3.20command line = +set cd_nocd 1 +set s_initsound 0Crusher demo, 640x480x16 |
| Quake 3 Arena | Retail Versioncommand line = +set cd_nocd 1 +set s_initsound 0Graphics detail set to 'Normal', 640x480x16Benchmark using 'Q3DEMO1' |
| Expendable | Downloadable Demo Versioncommand line = -timedemo640x480x16 |
| Unreal Tournament | Ver. 4.05b, high quality textures, medium quality skins, no tweaks640x480x16Benchmark using 'UTBench'. |
