Other Components
In this edition I refrained from adding any other component to the Power Box, such as a sound card, DVD-ROM, CD/RW and more, because the benchmarks in this first Power Box article would not benefit from it.
The Challengers
To give you some kind of idea of the performance of the Power Box, I compared it to two top-notch systems that are available right now. The first is a system equipped with Intel's Pentium 4 1.5 GHz processor, Asus P4T i850 motherboard, 256 MB PC800 RDRAM and a GeForce2 Ultra graphics card. The other system comes with AMD's Athlon 'C' 1.2 GHz, Asus A7M266 AMD760 motherboard, 256 MB PC2100 CL2 DDR-SDRAM and also a GeForce2 Ultra graphics card.
You will see that the second half of this article is a feast for benchmark addicts. I ran as many benchmarks as I could think of to compare the three systems. You will see that the Power Box is as good as unchallenged.
Test Setup
| System | Power Box | Pentium 4 System | Athlon DDR System |
| Processor | Athlon 'C' 1.6 GHz | Pentium 4 1.5 GHz | Athlon 'C' 1.2 GHz |
| Motherboard | MSI MS-6341 | Asus P4T | Asus A7M266 |
| Memory | 256 MB Micron/Crucial PC2100 DDR-SDRAM | 256 MB Samsung PC800 RDRAM | 256 MB Micron/Crucial PC2100 DDR-SDRAM |
| Graphics Card | NVIDIA GeForce 2 Ultra Reference Card 64 MB, Driver 6.67 (Win98/Win2k) |
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| Hard Drive | IBM DTLA-307075, 75 GB, 7200 RPM ATA100, FAT32 Win98, NTFS Win2k |
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| DirectX | 8.0a | ||
| Desktop Resolution for BAPCo's Sysmark 2000 and Webmark2001 | 1024x768x16x85 | ||
| Webmark2001 | MSIE 5.01 Timer Resolution 10 ms Java enabled, 5.0 JVM 5.0.0.3310 JavaScript 1.3 Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.05 Cult3D 5.0.1.43 Flash 5.0.30.0 Microsoft Agent 2.00.0.3422 RealPlayer 6.0.9.357 Quicktime 4.1.1 NetMeeting 3.01 Windows Media Player 6.4.09.1109 Windows Media Services 4.1.00.3918 |
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| Quake 3 Arena | Retail Version no sound |
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| Unreal Tournament | Version 4.28 (patched) no sound |
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| MDK2 | Downloadable Demo Version T&L = On, trilinear filtering, high texture detail |
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| Evolva | Rolling Demo v1.2 Build 944 Standard command line = -benchmark Bump Mapped command line = -benchmark -dotbump |
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| Mercedes Benz Truck Racing | Recommended GeForce2 Settings | ||
| Expendable | Downloadable Demo Version command line = -timedemo |
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| 3d Mark 2000 | Build 335, Default Benchmark | ||
| SiSoft Sandra Standard | Version 2000.3.6.4 | ||
| Desktop Resolution for SPECviewperf 6.1.2 | 1280x1024x32x85 | ||
| FlasK Settings | Video Codec: DivX 3.11 alpha, Fast-Motion, keyframe every 10 seconds, compression 100, data rate 910 kbps Audio Codec: audio not processed Video Resolution: 720x480, 29.97 fps, interlaced Resizing: Nearest Neighbor |
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