Now let’s check the performance of our testing participants in gaming applications.

As you remember, AMD Athlon XP 3000+ used to be the fastest in 3DMark2001 SE. However, today the situation changed not in AMD’s favor. Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz with dual-channel DDR400 appeared faster than the competitor from AMD. Pentium 4 3.0GHz proved also pretty fast with the i845PE chipset. It means that the overclocked i845PE can be used as a basis for a gaming platform as well.

Futuremark 3DMark03 is a benchmark that loads the graphics subsystem very heavily. This is exactly why the results of all platforms tested differ just a tiny bit from one another. Nevertheless, the advantage of the 800MHz bus is evident even here.

It would be much more exciting to check the CPU score index provided by this benchmark. This parameter is obtained during software vertex shaders calculation, which loads not only the CPU, but also the memory subsystem.

Here we see very clearly the advantage of the 800MHz bus as well as the positive effect of the PAT technology. The use of faster bus speeds up Return to Castle Wolfenstein by about 10%, PAT technology implemented in i875 – by about 3%. Also note that high speed memory subsystem is very important for games built on Quake3 engine. As a result the platform built with i845PE chipset and 800MHz bus falls 12% behind i875 based platform. Also note that if you use CPUs with 533MHz bus frequency, i875 and i865 chipsets will perform almost equally fast. So, if you have been considering the purchase of an i875 based mainboard for a system with Pentium 4 processor supporting 533MHz bus, we suggest that you should change your mind.

Almost the same picture appears in Unreal Tournament 2003. The only difference here is the outstandingly high performance of AMD Athlon XP 3000+ processor.