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:

Processor Athlon XP 3200+ 2.2GHz
Front-side bus 400MHz (2 x 200MHz)
Motherboard NVIDIA reference DFI Lanparty NFII Ultra VIA reference
North bridge nForce2 Ultra 400 SPP KT880
South bridge nForce2 MCP2-Gb nForce2 MCP-T VT8237
Chipset drivers NVIDIA ForceWare 4.24 NVIDIA ForceWare 3.13 VIA Hyperion 4.51
Memory size 512MB (2 DIMMs)
Memory type Corsair XMS3200C2 DDR SDRAM at 400MHz
Hard drive

Western Digital Raptor WD360GD Serial ATA hard drive
Maxtor 740X-6L 40GB 7200RPM ATA/133 hard drive
Graphics ATI Radeon 9800 XT with Catalyst 4.3 drivers
OS Microsoft Windows XP Professional
OS updates Service Pack 1, DirectX 9.0b

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. We ran all the systems with 2-6-3-2 memory timings.

The test systems' Windows desktops were set at 1280x1024 in 32-bit color at a 75Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

Our tests and methods are generally publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.