Making a new CPU platform, Northwood 'C'
To fully concentrate on GPU performance you need to remove all other slow parts from your system. I don't have access to the Hexus 2.8GHz Pentium 4 and NVIDIA and AMD took back their lovely Athlon XP test rigs so I had to improvise.
So in true Blue Peter style, I made an Intel Pentium 4 2.8C platform from a 2.26B, ABIT IT7-MAX and some lovely Samsung PC2700 DDR memory. No sticky back plastic I'm afraid.
The 'C' part of the nomination relates to the processor running on a 166MHz front side bus frequency, the next logical step up from the 'B' processors on 133MHz front side bus. The 17x multiplier on the 2.26B and the 166MHz bus frequency gives you the following.
The processor and motherboard oblige without any problems and with a 3:4 memory ratio and CL2.5, 6-3-3 timings, the Samsung doesn't miss a beat at 222MHz either. In raw figures that's nearly 5.1GB/sec in processor bandwidth and just under 3.4GB/sec from the memory controller and Samsung memory to feed that 5.1GB/sec of hungry CPU.
Heady numbers and certainly should help remove the rest of the system from the equation and let us concentrate on GPU performance. While a regular 2.8GHz processor would have been nice, it wasn't to be for the purposes of this article. Hope you don't mind.
Here's the formal hardware and software setup.
• Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9700 Pro, 128MB
• ABIT IT7-MAX Motherboard, Socket 478, Intel i845D, DDR Memory
• Intel Pentium 4 2.26B 'Northwood' @ 166MHz FSB (2.833GHz, 2.8C effective)
• 256Mb Samsung PC2700 DDR Memory Module (CAS2.5, 6-3-3)
• MSI G4Ti4400-VTD (MS-8871) GeForce4 Ti4400 128MB @ 300/650 (Ti4600 effective)
• Adaptec 39160 PCI SCSI Dual Channel U160 controller
• 2 x 73Gb Seagate Cheetah U160 10,000rpm SCSI disks
• 1 x 18.2Gb Seagate Cheetah U160 15,000rpm SCSI disk
• Plextor 12/10/32S SCSI CDRW
• Pioneer DVD-303 6x Slot-load SCSI DVD
• Creative Soundblaster Audigy Player Retail
• Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
• NVIDIA DetonatorXP 40.41 drivers
• Plutonium XP 8.1 Radeon 9700 driver set (based on 6166)
• Quake3 v1.30
• 3DMark 2001 Professional Second Edition
• Serious Sam: The Second Encounter Demo
• Codecreatures Benchmark Pro
• Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo
Benchmarks were done 3 times and the highest and lowest results were discarded leaving the middle result to represent the performance. If performance deviated by 2% either way from the mid result a further set of 3 results were captured until 3 'good' results were available. Windows XP Professional for the operating system and the latest available drivers for each card.
Let's start with 3DMark 2001 and Quake 3 v1.30, the staple diet of any graphics card review.
