System Setup

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Cards
I am using a PNY GeForce4 MX440 to compare against this card, mainly because it’s probably right what is in ATI’s targets. I don’t personally think the MX440 stands a chance, but it’s nice to see the benchmarks anyway. I am also comparing it to my own personal Visiontek GeForce3 Ti200, which is an accurate representation of a DirectX 8 compliant card.

System
I’m using my own personal system to benchmark everything—it has been freshly formatted with Windows 2000 and the latest official drivers for each card are installed. I know a lot of you have been clamoring about the NVIDIA Detonator 40 drivers but the drivers are still in beta testing therefore I found it inappropriate to use beta drivers for a video card review.

Since I run my CPU overclocked all the time, and I’m sure many of you also do, I turned up the CPU to the max. This should also give a good reflection of how these cards will perform once AMD moves to the 333MHZ bus.

  • AMD Athlon XP 1600+ @ 166MHz FSB (1743MHz)
  • 512MB Crucial PC2100
  • Epox 8KHA+
  • 80GB Western Digital Special Edition
  • Envision 19” Flat
  • ATI Catalyst 2.2 drivers
  • NVIDIA Detonator 30.82 drivers
Benchmarks Used
I’ve tried to choose a good selection of modern-day and future benchmarks to use, as well as the golden oldies like Quake 3, and of course 3DMark2001 SE.
  • Quake III: Arena
  • Wolfenstein MP Test
  • Jedi Knight II
  • Serious Sam: Second Encounter
  • Comanche4
  • DronezMark
  • Code Creatures
  • 3D Mark 2001: SE Build 330
Let’s move on to the numbers!
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