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 XP Pentium 4 DDR Pentium 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
Pentium 4 2.8GHz		 Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz
Pentium 4 2.8GHz
Front-side bus 266MHz (133MHz double-pumped) 533MHz (133MHz quad-pumped) 533MHz (133MHz quad-pumped)
Motherboard Epox 8K3A+ Abit SR7-8X Asus P4T533C
Chipset VIA KT333 SiS 648 Intel 850E
North bridge VT8367 648 82850E MCH
South bridge VT8233A 963 82801BA ICH2
Chipset drivers VIA 4-in-1
4.42v(a)		 SiS AGP 1.10 Intel Application Accelerator 6.22
Memory size 512MB (1 DIMM) 512MB (1 DIMM) 512MB (4 RIMMs)
Memory type Corsair XMS3000 PC2700 DDR SDRAM Corsair XMS3000 PC2700 DDR SDRAM Samsung PC1066 Rambus DRAM
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 128MB (Detonator XP 30.82 video drivers)
Sound Creative SoundBlaster Live!
Storage Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X 7200RPM ATA/100 hard drive
OS Microsoft Windows XP Professional
OS updates None

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.