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Our old favourites to start with, 3DMark 2001SE, Quake3 v1.30 and Serious Sam 2.
First up, 3DMark 2001SE performance. Last time around with nForce2, Radeon 9700 Pro and XP2700+ we nearly broke 15,000 marks out of the box, can we do it this time?
3DMark 2001SE performance
The graph isn't especially clear but the Leadtek and R9700 Pro managed a score of 15101 3DMarks, breaking 15,000 for the first time for me on an AMD system out of the box. The latest CATALYST 3.1 have a hand in the performance here with a slight increase in performance over the Plutonium XP 8.1 set from Omega that I've used previously. A good start for the Leadtek against it's AMD peers but not quite enough to beat out the RDRAM P4 solutions which sit pretty at the top of the pile.
The onboard core performance isn't very hot but it's not bad given the overall power of the core and the fact it's using system memory. NV17 is a pretty poor discrete GPU in my eyes but it makes for a decent on board solution, certainly better than the rubbish on any Intel i845G board.
Quake3 next but no P4 performance since my Q3 data set is a bit scrambled in that regard, my apologies. It lets us take an isolated look however at the integrated graphics core and see what TwinBank performance does for us in terms of overall bandwidth. The test is run at 512x384 Fastest to let system bandwidth do its thing.
Quake3 v1.30 performance
The onboard core keeps up with the R9700 Pro in this artificial system bandwidth configuration of the Quake3 benchmarks, that was to be expected. The non TwinBank score with the IGP core is the most interesting. We lose a fair chunk of overall performance with a single stick of memory and while only having < 256MB of memory in that test is a factor, TwinBank mode really does help in this situation when pushing the onboard core, freeing up memory bandwidth for the rest of the system by pooling it from the 2nd memory controller.
Serious Sam 2 next.
Serious Sam 2 performance
Here we see the K7NCR18G drop slightly behind the Asus A7N8X but not by too much and it can be explained away by driver changes. The interesting part of this graph is the IGP performance, again we see running TwinBank with the IGP core enabled is the way to go if you are running that core, the drop in performance in single channel mode is too much to stomach. Configure your memory well on nForce2 if using the IGP core. High end performance with R9700 Pro remains high, 100fps was easy for this benchmark on the Leadtek, despite Excel's best attempts to tell you otherwise.
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