Performance Comparison - Pentium3 550MHz

I thought it might be interesting to compare the cards on a lower-specced system. I imagine there are a lot of people out there wondering whether a new CPU or a faster video card would give the biggest boost to their gaming experience - hopefully by comparing this page's info with the previous one you can get a feel for what would be best for your system.

Testbed Info:
Asus P3V4X Motherboard
Intel Pentium3 550E
Generic PC100 CAS2 SDRAM
Generic 300W PSU
Western Digital 5400RPM 10GB HDD

Win98SE
VIA 4-in-1 v4.23
Detonators v5.32

Cards Tested:
Creative Labs 3DBlaster GeForce2 Ultra 64MB @ Default (250MHz Core / 458MHz DDR Memory)
Leadtek Winfast GeForce2 GTS 32MB @ Default (200MHz Core / 333 MHz DDR Memory)
MSI 8809 AGPhantom 3D GeForce SDR 32MB @ Default (120MHz Core / 166Mhz Memory)
Diamond Viper V770U TNT2 Ultra 32MB @ Default (150MHz Core / 183MHz Memory)

It takes about 2 hours to benchmark each card in each system, hence my not doing overclocked scores for the TNTU and GeForceSDR. Time was running pretty tight for this series of benchmarks too, so I did all cards at default clock only.

Again, you can get the data file here if you want the exact numbers - this is the SAME FILE as the previous page.

3DMark2000:

On this slower system, the two GeForce2 cards take pretty much everything the P3 can throw at them. The only real difference shows up in 32bit benchmarking, where the Ultra is 23% faster at 1600x1200. At that same resolution in 16 bit, the difference drops to 5%. At 1024x768x16 and below, the two cards are almost identical in this benchmark on this system which indicates to me that neither are being flooded by the P3 or the memory bandwidth of this system.

Quake3:

Again, pretty simple to understand results. The Ultra is faster but not amazingly so - 17% faster in the High Quality 1024x768 test.