Labs

Chips With Everything

For our tests to be fair, all the processors had to be able to run at their top performance without any of the other parts in the system creating a bottleneck. For this reason we ran all our benchmarks using the fastest 400MHz DDR memory, an nVidia GeForce4 Ti 4600 graphics card and the latest Serial ATA hard disk drive. The only exception was Via's C3. This chip uses the Socket 370 fitting, and no Socket 370 board is available that supports Serial ATA hard disks. For that reason, we tested it using the fastest IDE hard drive available. Once everything was set up, we ran our normal 2D and 3D benchmarks to determine the performance of each processor.