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Aquamark for the first of our pair of benchmarks at this stage of the review. Shader heavy and reliant on some good processing and graphics muscle, Aquamark is a nice DirectX 8 based benchmark that likes to push your system to the limit. Any benchmark that cripples a system to the tune of 14fps from a 2.26B and GeForce4 Ti4400 at 1024x768 (albeit with 8-tap anistropic texture filtering enabled) suits us just fine. More so than any of the other 3D benchmarks on test, you can guarantee good Aquamark performance equals good 3D performance overall. So lets see how we get on.
The AMD systems run away with it here. Aquamark seems to like the power of an Athlon XP under the hood. As far as the P4 systems go the EPoX is the quickest but by the smallest of measurable margins. 0.1fps is hardly a crushing victory in anyone's books but it is the quickest P4 based system on test.
So far, it seems like 4G4A+ is holding it's own against the rest of the systems. On to Serious Sam 2, another hard hitting full system test.
5 systems across 3 resolutions, all with broadly similar performance in each processor group and the Serious Sam 2 graph is a little unexciting. A closer squint shows the EPoX second to the MSI at the lowest test resolution but in the higher resolutions it's the fast board on test.
The EPoX has always been there or thereabouts as far as the other benchmarks are concerned and this time it takes the winners spot. In real world terms, it's the same as the other systems (remember, features and price are king when the chipset and CPU are the same) but it's a performance win for EPoX.
Let's carry on with Comanche 4 before a look at some non-gaming related tests.
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