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 3200+ Athlon XP 2500-3000+ Pentium 4 2.53-3.06GHz Pentium 4 2.4-3.0GHz
Processor Athlon XP 'Barton' 3200+ 2.2GHz Athlon XP 'Thoroughbred' 2600+ 2.083GHz
Athlon XP 'Barton' 2500+ 1.83GHz
Athlon XP 'Barton' 2800+ 2.083GHz
Athlon XP 'Barton' 3000+ 2.166GHz		 Pentium 4 2.53GHz
Pentium 4 2.8GHz
Pentium 4 3.06GHz		 Pentium 4 'C' 2.4GHz
Pentium 4 'C' 2.6GHz
Pentium 4 'C' 2.8GHz
Pentium 4 3.0GHz
Front-side bus 400MHz (200MHz DDR) 333MHz (166MHz DDR) 533MHz (133MHz quad-pumped) 800MHz (200MHz quad-pumped)
Motherboard Asus A7N8X Deluxe v2.0 Asus A7N8X Deluxe v2.0 Aopen AX4R Plus Intel D875PBZ
North bridge nForce2 SPP nForce2 SPP 82845G MCH 82875P MCH
South bridge nForce2 MCP-T nForce2 MCP-T 82801DB ICH4 82801ER ICH5R
Chipset drivers 2.03 2.03 Intel Application Accelerator 2.3 Intel Application Accelerator for RAID 3.0
Memory size 512MB (2 DIMMs) 512MB (2 DIMMs) 512MB (2 DIMMs) 512MB (2 DIMMs)
Memory type Corsair TwinX XMS3200LL DDR SDRAM at 400MHz Corsair TwinX XMS3200LL DDR SDRAM at 333MHz Corsair TwinX XMS3200LL DDR SDRAM at 266MHz Kingmax DDR-400 SDRAM at 400MHz
Hard drive Seagate Barracuda V 120GB ATA/100 Seagate Barracuda V 120GB ATA/100 Seagate Barracuda V 120GB ATA/100 Seagate Barracuda V 120GB SATA 150
Graphics ATI Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB (7.84 drivers)
Sound Creative SoundBlaster Live!
OS Microsoft Windows XP Professional
OS updates Service Pack 1, DirectX 9

All tests on the Pentium 4 'C', 3.0GHz, and 3.06GHz systems were run with Hyper-Threading enabled. The other Pentium 4 chips tested here don't support Hyper-Threading.

Thanks to Corsair for providing us with 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.

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.