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Driver Issues

I know, this can potentially open a can of worms but it is necessary to explain some issues here regarding the compatibility of different revisions of the nVidia Detonator drivers with different platforms. Originally all systems were tested using the Detonator 21.81 revision of the nVidia drivers. Interestingly, while these drivers were working flawlessly with some of the mainboards tested, we observed a minor (some 10%) performance hit with the Shuttle AK31 rev. 3.1 in Expendable compared to some earlier test results obtained with the VIA KT266A reference board. In Quake3 Arena, the discrepancy was even more pronounced, amounting to some 30% difference in frame rates. To make a long story of testing different driver revisions short, it turns out that on the VIA266A chipset, the Detonator XP drivers yield rather poor results, whereas the 14.40 drivers show some 25-30% increase in frame rates. One example, chosen for its quick and dirty nature is Incoming gameindex.exe.

Incoming gameindex.exe frame rates for the three test boards. Vsync was disabled in all runs and onboard sound was disabled. For absurd frame rates, the scores for the overclocked Athlon XP 1800+ are added. Numbers behind the board model indicate the real clock speed without QuantiSpeed adjustment. The AK31 21.81 scores was achieved at 1533 MHz real clock rate. The 1656 MHz setting might qualify for an Athlon 1950+ and was the highest stable setting. With the DetonatorXP nVidia drivers (21.81), both the VIA KT266A reference board and the Shuttle AK31 Rev. 3.1 showed rather disappointing performance in 3D gaming applications. The AMD 761-based Gigabyte GA-7DX, on the other hand gave pretty identical frame rates regardless of whether the 21.81 or the older 14.40 reference drivers were used. Interestingly, the Shuttle AK31 using the 14.40 drivers slightly outperformed the VIA KT266 reference board in Incoming.

The problem in a case like this is that it is impossible to test all previously released versions of driver across the board and, thus, the benchmark results are somewhat sketchy, however, in all cases, we used what we found was the optimal driver for any given platform. In detail, for the AMD 760 and Intel chipsets, the 21.81 drivers showed top performance while on the VIA KT266A chipset, the 14.40 drivers proved superior. Again, with limited time and resources we can only show stepping stones and there may be other drivers out there that provide even better performance on a given platform. We feel confident, though, that the data posted at least provide a good approximation to the best possible performance of each platform. Alternatively, we could have posted all benchmarks for the different platforms using different drivers in different applications, however, aside from confusion and bandwidth, we don't think this additional information would have added much.

System configurations

Overclocking

As shown above, it was possible to overclock the Athlon XP 1800+ to 1656 MHz. Since mainboard manufacturers are sometimes somewhat nonchalant with their bus speed settings and the BIOS ID strings showing the CPU frequency in the POST screen, all frequencies shown are based on CPUID. The identified clock frequencies were up to 5 MHz higher than those displayed at POST. On the Shuttle AK31, it was possible to boot into Windows at up to 1710 MHz with raising Vre by 0.05V to a value of 1.76 V, however, without enough stability to run anything but CPUID or SiSoft Sandra.

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