I will be using 3DMark2001SE, 3DMark2003, Quake 3, Serious Sam 2, and Unreal Tournament 2003 to benchmark this video card. All of the testing was done with all the eye candy turned on and everything at it’s highest. I will be benchmarking with the resolutions of 1024×768, 1280×1024, and 1600×1200. With Unreal tournament 2003 I used 1280×960 because the benchmark tool did not have 1280×1024 as an option. I used ATi’s Catalyst 3.9 driver and ran all the tests from my system which was just formatted with Windows XP.
Test Bed:
- Abit NF7-S Rev 2.0
- 1800+ Thoroughbred
- 60GB Seagate Barracuda IV HDD
- 1024MB PC3200 Corsair TwinX
- Power-Color Radeon 9200SE
- Koolcase’s Panther
- Plextor 40x12x40 CDRW
- Plextor PX-504A DVD+RW
- SilenX 400w PSU (review to come)
- AOpen AC7L2 heatsink (review to come)
3DMark2001SE is a DirectX 8 benchmark and is the predecessor to 3DMark03 however I feel it is still a good benchmarking program. With all three resolutions this card falls behind the other 3 tested, even the lowley 5200 Ultra. This being the least intensive benchmark leaves me little hope that it will do any better with the other benchmarks. The low power of this card leaves it unable to break 4000 points at any resolution.
3DMark03 is one of the newest synthetic benchmarking programs from Futuremark and widely used for comparison of video cards. 3DMark03 is a DirectX 9 benchmarking program so this Radeon 9200SE is at a clear disadvantage. As with the 3DMark2001SE benchmark the results are very poor, worse even. The card was unable to even get 700 points at 1024×768 which isn’t good. Though these 2 tests are just synthetic it gives you an idea of how the cards are going to perform when it comes to real world application.
I set everything to the best settings then ran demo001 which is what I always use. I was happy to see that this card was able to do pretty well at all resolutions, especially at 1024×768. Above that the frame rates were not very good however they would still be playable and not too choppy. Quake 3 is a somewhat old game so the graphics are not too intensive so we will see how the card fares on the next page with some newer games.
