Test Setup #1
 

Processors Mainboard Sound Card Memory Hard Drive SCSI Controller Operating System

: Pentium III 500MHz and Pentium II 450 : ASUS P2B-F : Sound Blaster Live! : 256 MB CAS-2 PC100 SDRAM (Mushkin) : Seagate 9.1GB Cheetah 9LP : Adaptec ABP940-UW : Windows 98 SE

Test Setup #2
 

Processors Mainboard Sound Card Memory Hard Drive SCSI Controller Operating System

: AMD K6-III 450 and AMD K6-III 400 : ASUS P5A : Sound Blaster Live! : 128 MB CAS-2 PC100 SDRAM (Mushkin) : Seagate 9.1GB Cheetah 9LP : Adaptec ABP940-UW : Windows 98 SE

Each Windows test was run three times and the average figures were taken into consideration. The gaming tests ran five times to take an average measurement. V-Sync was disabled at all times to ensure maximum frame rate.

Windows 98 ran with DirectX version 6.1

The display drivers that were used in testing were  the most up to date retail drivers that were available at the time of this article..

For evaluating 3DNow! performance a K6-III system was used with the nVidia v1.88 reference driver.

2D Performance
   
Generally speaking, 2D performance is good, and as expected, the differences in performance between cards are marginal... Allowing for the cards with higher core and memory clock speeds, of course.