Uncle Goy Goes Benchmarking

We always get a lot of questions regarding which part of their Computer people should upgrade first, CPU/MoBo or the video card.......

My take is that it doesn't matter how good your video card is if you don't have the CPU to back it up, and all the fancy screenshots in the world won't mean a thing to you if you still have to run in lesser resolutions and with lots of details switched off just to keep an acceptable frame rate. Personally I don't think "First Person Shooter" (FPS from now on) games like Quake3 make for very good benchmarks. A FSP game doesn't have a demanding physics engine running in the background eating valuable CPU cycles, nor do most bechmarks like 3DMark2000 (www.madonion.com) which I used in these tests because it's a widespread one and it kind of proves my point as you will see when you start looking at the numbers I got.

This is not meant as a "test to end all tests" kind of thing, there's way too much I don't know about video cards to even contemplate such a task. It's just meant as another tool to help you choose what to do when you have some extra cash to throw at your Computer.

One thing it shows though, is that just because one combination seems to be working very well in 3DMark, doesn't mean that it's necessarily faster in your favourite sim. Remember those CPU cycles that are "wasted" on other things besides Gfx.......this will be important when racing online as well, since some CPU cycles will be used for whatever is needed to keep you online. Therefore, the "ideal" video card would be one that does more on less CPU cycles, because we don't have access to all of them while racing our fav sims.

This article was actually started by coinsidence. A customer of ours asked if we could check out his ISDN card over the holidays, as he was going away on vacation and didn't need his PC. The PC in question was a P3-550 that I knew from earlier, so I decided to bring the thing home with me and do some testing, i.e. see how CPU speed vs FSB speed related since I also had access to a P3-700. The P3-700 ran stable at 980 on my old ASUS CUSL2 :-), and the 550 has been rock solid at 770, even at 825 but then only with PCI video cards as the AGP bus is running way too fast by then. It's running on an ASUS CUBX MoBo and the BX chip set doesn't like it when we run at 150 FSB speed.....

So here's the setup:

Common for all

Various video cards :-), release reference drivers only, no "special" tweaks
Quantum 7,5 GB UDMA33 Harddrive
Soundblaster Live! 1024 Value (Liveware 3.0)
Windows 98SE with DirectX 7.0, also installed VIA 4-1 drivers and such for the AMD tests
3DMark2000
Mercedes Benz Truck Racing (German demo), used the TNT2/Geforce settings
Nascar Heat (demo), everything maxed out in the options, ran high detail cars where possible
All tests run in 1024x768, 16bit colours

Cel300A
ASUS P3B-F
128 MB PC133 RAM, generic

P3-550E
ASUS CUBX
128 MB PC133 RAM, generic, which makes the 150 FSB speeds we ran at one point even more amazing...

P3-533B
ASUS P3B-F
128 MB PC133 RAM, generic

P3-700E
ASUS P3B-F
128 MB PC133 RAM, generic

AMD Duron 700
ASUS A7V (see a pattern yet ? :-)
128 MB PC133 CAS2, MemoryMan (Mosel Vitalic, same as Crucial)

AMD T-Bird 1100
ASUS A7V
128 MB PC133 CAS2, MemoryMan (Mosel Vitalic, same as Crucial)

The Video cards at hand at various times have been

3Dfx Voodoo Banshee 16 MB, Creative
3Dfx Voodoo 3-3000 16 MB
3Dfx Voodoo 5-5500 64 MB

ATI Rage Fury 128 32MB
ATI Rage Fury MAXX 64 MB
ATI Radeon 32 SDR

nVIDIA Riva TNT1 16 MB, Creative
nVIDIA Riva TNT2 M64 PRO 32 MB, CardExpert
nVIDIA GefForce 256 32 MB, ASUS 6600
nVIDIA GeForce DDR 32 MB, Creative
nVIDIA GeForce 2MX 32MB, CardExpert, "Golden Sample"
nVIDIA GeForce 2 PRO/400 64MB, CardExpert, "Golden Sample"

More cards will be added to the database when I can get my hands on them, and I'll try to run them on as many CPU combos as I can, but not all of these systems are available to me at all times, so here goes.........

*A few notes*

The 3Dfx Banshee and V3-3000 cards refused to run MBTR properly in the settings I had chosen, but rather than "compromising" with the settings, I chose to skip them altogether, because the whole point here was to run in 1024x768 and 16 bit colors. This resolution/color depth is pretty much what we'd expect from our systems these days.

The ATI Radeon card was a strange one, it scored low and refused to run NHeat with High detail cars. I only had access to that card for one night so I didn't have time to sort it out properly, but chose to include it anyway as it ran MBTR decently at least and NHeat with LD cars too at least gives us a hint to it's performance.

The big surprise of the bunch was the ATI Rage Fury MAXX, and although it didn't run well in MBTR, it's 3Dmark scores are pretty good and it ran NHeat very very good. The same can be said for the V3-3000, which scales very nicely with the available CPU power.

No need to e-mail me and tell me that your particular card will run faster on the same CPU with only a few minor tweaks, I already know that :-), like I said earlier, these are all "default" settings as provided by the latest "release" drivers as of 12/20/00. I'll try and cover some aspects of "tweaking" to get the most out of your system at another time, this is only meant as a reference database to show you what you should expect from your CPU/vid card combo or help you make an informed decision when you spend your hard earned cash .......and in my honest opinion, unless you have a really crappy old video card, upgrade you MoBo and CPU first, here's a few examples........

As you can see, you get better perfomance spending less money on an AMD Duron with MoBo than you'd (most likely) get from bying the latest all singing and dancing video card to go with an "older" CPU, with or without cup holder. On the other hand, spending money on a really hot CPU/Mobo and then have it crippled by an ancient video card doesn't make too much sense either, better to spend a little less on the CPU and get a decent vid card to go with it, unless of course you are getting a very good deal on a certain CPU/MoBo combo right now and plan on getting the vid card next... just don't get too disappointed if you don't get all you hoped for right away....:-)