Well, it's that time again. When the Aquamark benchmark came out, I found that Sharok's score was a pitiful 17k, whereas 20k was declared necessary for high-quality gameplay.
So, with 3000 points goading me, I blew another wad of cash and simultaneously betrayed NVidia with a Radeon 9800. Well, I've already said that my loyalty goes to the best equipment available.
| Elements | Sharok |
| Motherboard | ASUS A7N8X deluxe (NForce2, 400Mhz bus) |
| CPU | AMD XP 3 000+ (2,34 Ghz) |
| Bus speed | 333Mhz DDR |
| Video Card | ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (128Mb) |
| RAM | 2 x 512Mb PC400 |
With the new motherboard came an option that I just could not pass up : SATA connectors. So, I purchased two converters for IDE to SATA, and reworked the internals arrangements. So, both hard disks are on a SATA bus, which is sure to give a boost in individual HDD performance since they no longer share a data bus.
The settings for 3DMark 2001SE were as follows :
| Element | Setting | Element | Setting |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resolution | 1024x768 | Color Depth | 32 bit color |
| Texture Format | Compressed | Z-Buffer Depth | 24 bit |
| Frame Buffer | Double | Rendering Pipeline | D3D Hardware T&L |
| FSAA | Not Enabled | CPU Speed | 2339 Mhz |
To keep in sequence with current practices, I used Aquamark, Codecreatures and 3DMark 2003 as other benchmarks. All of them were used at default settings.