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
Sound Blaster Live Value
Acer PCI Network card
Windows 98 SE
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.