Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least twice, and the results were averaged.

Our test systems were configured like so:

 Athlon XPPentium 4 DDRPentium 4 RDRAM
Processor AMD Athlon XP 2000+ 1.67GHz
AMD Athlon XP 2200+ 1.8GHz
AMD Athlon XP 2600+ 2.13GHz
Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz
Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz
Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz
Front-side bus266MHz (133MHz double-pumped)533MHz (133MHz quad-pumped)533MHz (133MHz quad-pumped)
MotherboardEpox 8K3A+Abit SR7-8XAsus P4T533C
ChipsetVIA KT333SiS 648Intel 850E
North bridgeVT836764882850E MCH
South bridgeVT8233A96382801BA ICH2
Chipset driversVIA 4-in-1
4.42v(a)
SiS AGP 1.10Intel Application Accelerator 6.22
Memory size512MB (1 DIMM)512MB (1 DIMM)512MB (4 RIMMs)
Memory typeCorsair XMS3000 PC2700 DDR SDRAMCorsair XMS3000 PC2700 DDR SDRAMSamsung PC1066 Rambus DRAM
GraphicsNVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 128MB (Detonator XP 30.82 video drivers)
SoundCreative SoundBlaster Live!
StorageMaxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X 7200RPM ATA/100 hard drive
OSMicrosoft Windows XP Professional
OS updatesNone

I want to give a big thanks to Corsair for providing us with DDR333 memory for our testing. If you're looking to tweak out your system to the max and maybe overclock it a little, Corsair's RAM is definitely worth considering. Using it makes life easier for us as we're dealing with brand-new chipsets and pre-production motherboards, because we don't have to worry so much about stability and compatibility. The stuff flat works.

The test systems' Windows desktops were set at 1024x768 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.