Excluding the graphics card, the following components make up my primary system, which has remained intact during the past year. The processor, motherboard, and memory were purchased last December.
System Specifications
AMD Athlon 64 4000+ Processor
Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe Motherboard
Corsair XMS 3200 Memory Model 3200LLPRO - (2) 512MB DIMMs - 1GB Total
Western Digital Raptor 74GB HDD (1), 10000RPM, 4.5ms Avg Seek, 8MB Buffer, SATA
Western Digital Caviar 80GB HDD (2), 7200RPM, 8.9ms Avg Seek, 8MB Buffer, ATA-100
NVIDIA ForceWare Graphics Driver Beta Version 81.87
NVIDIA nForce4 AMD Driver Package Version 6.53.02
Vsync Disabled / 75Hz Refresh Rate / 70Hz at 1920x1440 / 60Hz at 2048x1536
Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 / DirectX 9.0c
Game Benchmarks
FEAR - v1.02
Quake 4 - v1.0.0.0 Build 2147
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast - v1.0.1.0 Build 2547
Notes
Fraps was used to collect frame rate data in some benchmarks.
The driver image setting was set to quality (trilinear optimization on, anisotropic mip filter optimization off, anisotropic sample optimization on).
BENCHMARK RESULTS
Quake 4
Unfortunately, the current Quake 4 timedemo feature fails to render shadows and other special graphics effects, which makes it an inaccurate measure of game performance. To determine how well the GeForce 6800 GS performs in Quake 4, I developed a gameplay scenario. The scenario takes about two minutes to complete and begins by entering the building in the Air Defense Bunker level and concludes when meeting up with the Badger Squad.
The lowest frame rate occurred during the scene below. A 320x240 MPEG-1 video/audio clip of the entire Quake 4 gameplay scenerio can be downloaded using this link. (~ 20MB).
Quake 4
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Quake 4 Settings
Fraps was used to determine the average and minimum frame rate during each scenario. Fraps was also configured to record the frame rate per second, which is plotted on the graph next to each benchmark result.
Quake 4 Gameplay Results
FEAR
FEAR features an in-game benchmark, which was used to measure performance of the GeForce 6800 GS.
FEAR
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FEAR Settings
The FEAR benchmark provides average and minimum frame rate as well as the percentage of frames that were less than 25 fps, between 25 and 40 fps, and greater than 40 fps.
FEAR Performance Test Results
Note the custom resolutions of 1360x1020, 1344x1008, and 1400x1050, which were added to the system via NVIDIA's ForceWare Screen Resolutions & Refresh Rates applet.