|
Our pair of DX8 based heavyweights to kickstart proceedings. 3DMark first. AMD's own literature says 11102 marks but doesn't tell you the graphics card. Let's see if we get close with a Ti4400 at the helm.
Not quite 11,000+ but we get close. 8K5A2+ is an excellent platform for the CPU and we are more than likely card limited here. I'm guessing AMD's benchmark figure of 11102 is using a Ti4600 which seems to fit in terms of scaling.
My mock 2.53B is just a fraction off the pace but definitely in the same ball park 3DMark wise so the XP2600 has some competition. What about Aquamark, maybe the most testing of our game based benchmarks.
A milestone in terms of Aquamark performance for me in my reviews for Hexus, the first out of the box system to break the 60fps barrier consistently across the 3 average runs.
While you'd expect a bit more, I don't really give the CPU a lot of headroom with the Ti4400 and we are possibly a little card limited. Something else that will crop up the longer this review carries on is the fact that the CPU, being on a 133MHz processor bus, can only make use of 2.1GB/sec of memory bandwidth, even when paired with KT333 which gives it access to DDR333 mem. That extra 0.6GB/sec from the TwinMos memory on the test setup sits unused, the CPU unable to take advantage of it.
It doesn't set the house on fire to start with, hopefully its strengths and raw clock speed advantage will show up soon although it doesn't have the biggest ball park to run around in and it's probably feeling a little constrained by the graphics card and the memory bus.
Onto some Serious Sam 2 and some Quake3.
|
