Date:
Wednesday, May 14, 2003
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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AMD 3200+ / VIA KT600 / NV Ultra 400

The down and dirty on AMD's newest AthlonXP, VIA's newest chipset, and NVIDIA's newest chipset. Head to head to head.

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Gaming Benchmarks

3DMark 2001SE

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VIA KT600 edges out the nForce2 board and the Intel 3.0C edges both of the AMD boxes out of the picture. The fact that the VIA KT600 showed this good in this benchmark very much surprised me even after the showing we saw on the previous page. We simply have lost some faith in VIA over the last couple of quarters, but they seem to be back on track.

Quake 3

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Again we see the same placing with a bit different scaling. While Intel dominates this CPU and memory bandwidth intensive benchmark, AMD systems have been looking better and better all the time. Again we see VIA's KT600 best the current AMD chipset champ.

Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast

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This being another Quake 3 engine game, you should be expecting these figures. This time however the scores are so close together that it would be near impossible to detect which system was faster by gaming experience.

Serious Sam - The Second Encounter

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SS2 has always leaned the way of the AMD CPU and again we see the VIA Kt600 squeak out another win for itself in our gaming benchmarks.

Novalogic’s Comanche 4 Demo

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The Comanche demo did leave me a bit surprised as I simply was not expecting a gap this wide between our AMD platforms. I think what we are finding is that bandwidth on the memory side of things is a bit more important than I would have told you last year. I will look forward to testing more with retail boards.

Unreal Tournament 2003

Using our own [H]ardOCP benchmark tool

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First glance at this graph would leave you to believe that it is useless, and for the most part, you are correct. Our video card is becoming the bottleneck here. The reason I left this in was because this is the first time we have seen an AMD system show this restriction as the Pentium 4 system started doing a bit ago.