Benchmarking
Setup
Hardware
| CPU(s) |
AMD
Athlon XP 1800+ (1533 MHz) |
| Heatsink
& Fan | |
| Motherboard(s) |
Soltek
SL-75DRV2 |
| Memory |
256 MB DDR PC2100 (266 MHz) |
| Hard
Drive(s) | Western
Digital 27 GB ATA66 |
|
CD-ROM |
EPO
50x, Philips 8x CDRW |
| Sound
Card | On
board 3D Surround (AC97 Codec) |
| Video
Card | Matrox
G550 Dual-DVI |
Software
| Operating
System | Windows
2000 Professional |
| Video
/ VIA Drivers |
provided by Matrox |
| |
Benchmarking
Applications |
| OpenGL |
Quake
III Arena |
| DirectX |
Microsoft
DirectX 8.1 |
| Other |
Madonion
3DMark 2000 v1.1, 3D Mark 2001 |
AMD
was very gracious and sent in the XP 1800+ for my thrashing ; P. In reality this
CPU is 1500 MHz if you are at 200 MHz FSB or 1533 MHz at 266 MHz FSB so don't
let the 1800+ rating throw you off. Going back to Performance Rating is something
I think AMD should have avoided since it reminds us of the Cyrix days.
Once
again Bart from 1COOLPC has stepped in and
sent us an awesome heatsink to use for our testing. My first experience with the
ThermoEngine was unsatisfactory due to a slight crushing incident (!) but luckily
Bart is stocking copper shims for the Athlon XP and it appears that ThermoEngine
has made a slight change to the heatsink clipping mechanism. 
Add
to this the inclusion of a new high flow 60mm fan and it has turned out to be
a very impressive unit. How good? How does 107 degrees F after a lot of benchmarking
sound? At $35 for the heatsink and $8 for the shim you'd almost be nuts to pass
up the safety margin provided by this unit.
The
disk that features the drivers and additional software was in the box. Matrox
sent a newer disk which had a newer set of drivers which as it turns out are the
latest version you can download from their site. The latest drivers were version
572 for Win2k and even though they have an October release date the actual files
have September dates on them so hopefully we are due for an update.
