Socket-A Chipset Comparison - April 2001

Quake III Arena has always been a pleasure to benchmark with, simply because the scores it produces make sense and are repeatable, the benchmark stresses all of the major parts of the system, it is a widely available game and the engine is used in quite a few other titles making the benchmark very universal.

This is one of two OpenGL based games that are present in our gaming benchmark suite, the other being Serious Sam, a more recent release. 

The first thing you should take note of is the importance of platform choice in overall performance.  All of the 10 configurations listed in the above chart use the same speed processor, have the same amount of memory, use the same video card and use ghosted Windows 98SE installs on the same type of hard drive.  The only differences between the 10 contenders are the motherboard (chipset), FSB frequency and memory type/frequency.  Adjusting those three variables alone results in a range of 108 fps to 143 fps, a difference of 32%.

Of course it can't be cut that simple, since some of the memory types are more expensive than others, which is the case with motherboards as well. 

We'll save the individual analysis of what's going on here to the next set of numbers, since the standings are identical to what you see under Quake III Arena.  But what we want you to get out of this particular benchmark is an understanding of the gravity your platform decision has on your gaming performance.

We have been using UnrealTournament to measure video card performance almost since its introduction.  However, as pertinent as it is to graphics performance it happened to make an even better measure of CPU and chipset performance.