Just before jetting off to Vegas for this year's Comdex, the long awaited Savage 2000 arrived at the Sharky Extreme HQ. Although we're going to reserve our final judgement until we get back and spend more time with the board, we've run a few benchmarks for you. The drivers were not yet final so there may well be some juice left over in the tank by the time the card ships next week.
The board itself is set at 125MHz graphics clock and at 155MHz for the memory. Obviously this is lower than first announced and thus the originally touted 7-800M/Texels is closer to 500M/Texels (still a top-notch fill rate). As with former Diamond products, the Viper II comes with a software bundle, which includes an S3TC version of Acclaim's Trickstyle and a special S3TC Quake 3 level also. The retail version will sport 32MB SDRAM although the board we were sent indicated it only had 16MB (in the Bios and by layout) which is also worth taking into account when looking at the following benchmarks.
For this first in-house Savage 2000 test run, we used a powerful Pentium III 600MHz gaming rig and prepped it via scandisk and a Defrag for our benchmark suite. The test rig breaks down like this:
- Processor: Intel Pentium III 600MHz
- Memory: 128MB of WinTec PC100 RAM
- Motherboard: Abit BE6 2.0
- Hard Drive: Quantum Fireball 8.4 Gig HD.
- Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster Live! Value
- CD/DVD: Creative DXr5
- 3COM LAN Card.
- Windows 98 Second Edition with DirectX 7 installed
- Monitor: Sony Trinitron 400PS
We also used the following video cards with the following sets of drivers:
- Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator 32MB SDRAM- with Creative's v4.12.01.2202.01.0348 drivers
- Guillemot Maxi Gamer Xentor 32 TNT2 Ultra- with Guillemot's 2.40 drivers (10/29/99)
We choose to run Quake 3 and ran all timedemo's under both the 'NORMAL' and 'HIGH QUALITY' settings only changing the values for the resolution. All tests were run until a consistent score was obtained and with V-Sync turned 'off'. We then did a bonus round with textures set at maximum size of 512 x 512, just for fun.
Now on to the scores!