3DMark 2001SE, SS2, Comanche 4
A quick note here. The EPoX board was run with a discrete Radeon 9800 XT 256MB video card. Testing showed that the EZ18, when run with the same card, produced nigh-on identical results. That's why we're concentrating on results obtained by the integrated GeForce4 MX video. Remember that it runs with a core speed of 200MHz and shares memory bandwidth with the CPU. The interesting comparison will be with the Radeon 9100 IGP's video, although benchmarks at lower resolution are often helped by a powerful subsystem. A breakdown of the EZ18's score can be found here. A lack of DX8 support hampers the score, obviously.
Serious Sam 2 evens up the onboard graphics' performance. We're not talking about Intel Extreme 2 Graphics here, for both NVIDIA and ATI's integrated video is more than capable of handling slightly older games at reasonable resolutions and quality settings.
Although Comanche 4 was often stuttering when the polygon count and geometry requirement was pushed up. Our concern is that we now see high-end power laptops use discrete Mobility Radeon 9600s and even GeForce GoFX5700s. The only way to rival that sort of power is to invest in a discrete AGP card. As you can see, a Radeon 9800 XT does ever so nicely, though it costs more than the EZ18 SFF system.
