Maxi Gamer Phoenix Banshee

The benchmark suite consisted of the following full version game titles

• Forsaken - Running the Nuke Demo

Ziff Davis' Winbench 98 was used to test 2D performance at 1024 x 768 x 16-bit color.

VSYNC was disabled during AnandTech's tests (VSYNC is the synchronization of all buffer swaps to the refresh rate of your monitor, theoretically limiting the attainable frame rate by the refresh rate your monitor is set at.  Disabling it will improve performance but may degrade visual quality by introducing "tearing")

The drivers AnandTech tested with had no native OpenGL support rendering the Quake2 and SiN benchmarks useless as the test system simply wouldn't run the tests in any OpenGL/Glide modes.

For the in-depth gaming performance tests Brett "3 Fingers" Jacobs Crusher.dm2 demo was used to simulate the worst case scenario in terms of Quake 2 performance, the point at which your frame rate will rarely drop any further.  In contrast, the demo1.dm2 demo was used to simulate the ideal situation in terms of Quake 2 performance, the average high point for your frame rate in normal play.  The range covered by the two benchmarks can be interpreted as the range in which you can expect average frame rates during gameplay.

The presence of L2 cache and the raw performance of the CPU on the test system didn't seem to truly affect the performance of the Banshee all too much.  For the most part, the Unreal benchmarks resided in the 26 - 29 fps range at 640 x 480, 22 - 23 fps at 800 x 600, and they all seemed to stay at around 17 fps at 1024 x 768.  Translation?  For high end systems, with faster processors, the Banshee isn't the ideal chipset to aim for as it doesn't scale with processor speed too well.   However if you have a lower end system, such as a first generation Pentium II (233 - 300), the Banshee, especially the Maxi Gamer Phoenix, is probably what you've been waiting for.