Games Benchmark
I decided to show you Unreal Tournament 2003 as the first real world test. The game has only just been released, and is an ideal test of next generation games with incredible eye candy. This game is very CPU limited with a top end graphics card in the system. I ran the tests at multiple CPU speeds with the same maximum bus speed to show just how much of an effect a faster FSB/Memory bus can have compared to the default 133MHz. I think you will find the results jaw dropping:
Looking at the chart you will see that a 1.5GHz CPU speed on a 200MHz bus is outperforming 2.0 GHz on a 133MHz bus!. This just goes to show that raw CPU MHz is useless without the bus speed there to back it up. May I also point out that a 1.5GHz and a 2.0Ghz XP CPU is the difference between a 1750+ and 2400+ rating!. This benchmark also forces on maximum detail, which still makes it partially dependent on graphics card speed. I'm sure if the detail level was reduced to normal the gap between the lower and higher bus speed setups would widen further.
Ahh, 3D Mark, the reviewers old favourite bench. a review isn't a review without 3D Mark being in there somewhere :) .Once again bus speed wins through, more so than the Unreal Tournament 2003 bench's. The difference between the default 133 and 200 MHz bus's is staggering, and again memory timings are shown to make a noticeable difference in performance. I'm sure that if I ran a bench at 1.4ghz / 200 it would still come in faster than the default 2ghz / 133 setup - again AMD platforms are shown to be completely bottlenecked by their system and memory bus's.
Quake 3 is another game that guzzle's up memory bandwidth like there's no tomorrow. By running at the lowest possible graphical settings, we can remove the graphics card from the bottleneck equation. This test shows the biggest reliance on memory bandwidth out of all the tests. The 1.5ghz setup takes 3rd place, beating out even the 2ghz /166 setup. which is representative of future AMD processors. In reality though things are not quite as bad as they look for this game...people don't run at 512x384 with all the graphics turned to 'mud quality' - at normal graphical settings the distance between each system is much smaller. This game is now fairly long in the tooth so runs fast on any modern system...Unreal Tournament however is fresh off the press and really shows the need for higher bus speeds.
