I tested the Power Color SNiper 2 M64 on
Celeron 366 running at 567Mhz. It had the following equipment:
-
Intel Celeron 366 at 567Mhz
-
Abit BX6 v2 Motherboard
-
In Win 24" ATX Case With 250 Watts PS
-
128 Megs PC-125 SDRAM
-
Acer 40X CD Rom
-
Seagate Medalist Pro 6.5 Gig 7200RPM
Hard Drive
I used Quake 2, Quake 3, Unreal and 3D Mark
99 Max as the benchmarks. All tests were ran 3 times and the average score is
shown. All drivers were the latest ones from the manufacturers.
The Power Color SNiper M64 was running at
default speed of 100/110 using NVIDIA 2.08 drivers. Just for comparison, I
tossed in the scores from our Viper 770 running at it's stock speed of 125/150.
However keep in mine that the Viper's benchmarks were done on a P3-450.
Vsync was turned off. No tweaks or special
cfg files were used. 3D Mark 99 Max was ran at 800x600, 16 bit color, 16 bit
Z-Buffer, Triple Frame Buffer.
The Quake 3 timedemo was ran on the default "high
quality" setting found in the graphic options, which are:
Resolution: 800x600
Graphic mode: HIGH QUALITY
GL Driver: DEFAULT
GL extensions: ON
Color : 32 BIT
Full screen: ON
Lighting: LIGHTMAP
Geometric detail: HIGH
Texture detail: 3
Texture quality: 32 BIT
Texture Filter: TRILINEAR
The game options are:
Marks on walls: YES
Ejecting brass: YES
Dynamic lighting: YES
Light flares: NO
Identify target: YES
High quality sky: YES
Benchmark Scores
| Benchmark Type |
SNiper2
TNT2 M64 |
Viper V770 |
| Quake 2 Demo1 800x600 |
51.7 |
79.2 |
| Quake 2 Demo1 1024x768 |
37.4 |
51.4 |
| Quake 2 Crusher 800x600 |
44.6 |
54.5 |
| Quake 2 Crusher 1024x768 |
32.3 |
41.2 |
| Quake 3 Demo 1 |
14.6 |
32.8 |
| Quake 3 Demo 2 |
26.1 |
53.5 |
| Unreal Timedemo 800x600 |
33.2 |
32.6 |
| Unreal Timedemo 1024x768 |
26.3 |
25.5 |
| 3D Mark 99 Max 800x600 |
3725 |
4466 |
With the exception of the Quake 3 scores the
SNiper TNT2 M64 did quite well against a Viper 770 that cost twice as much. You
will notice the SNiper even beat the Viper in the Unreal test. This has more to
do with the CPU than the video card. Unreal makes more use of the CPU than Quake
does so the advantage goes to the SNiper running a Celeron 567 over a Viper 770
running a P3-450.
The 3D Mark 99 score also varies greatly
depending on the CPU. Here the advantage goes to the Viper 770 with the P3
because 3D Mark 99 takes advantage of the SSE instructions used by the Pentium
3.
The low Quake 3 score is really
disappointing. Even a Viper 770 with only 16 megs of ram can double the scores
the SNiper got. If Quake 3 is your game, this is not your card.
Next Page: Overclocking the SNiper