Introduction
So many choices and you've got to select one. Yes, that's right. With such great video cards out there we are repeatedly bombarded with questions like; "dear Technoyard, I`m a hardcore fanatic of Quake 3. My machine configuration is blah blah blah…I`m thinking of getting a new video card, so what should I buy?. The 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 ,ATI Radeon, GeForce2 Ultra or the NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS ? regards , MadMax"
(btw,We like this type of feedback guy's!! so keep it comming in!)
So we realized what the killing question for the masses was, and put together this article; the Q3 Video Card round up.
Nobody out there is going to run any of these $350+ cards on a Celeron 300A now are they, so we put the cards to test on both a PIII 1 GHz and an Athlon 1 GHz processor. Enough of the 'yack' yack' let's head straight to the test rigs and then on to the benchmarks.
Test System
| CPU | Intel Coppermine PIII-1GHz |
| Motherboard | Intel VC820 i820 Motherboard |
| CPU | AMD Athlon 1GHz |
| motherboard | Abit KT7 motherboard |
| Memory | 128 MB Crucial PC133 CAS-2 DRAM |
| Hard Drive | IBM Deskstar 34GB DMA/66 |
| Video Cards | NVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra-Detonator 3 (6.18) NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS (32 MB) Detonator 3 (6.18) 3dfx Voodoo5 5500- 1.01.00 Ati Radeon (64 MB)- 4.12.3044 |
| Sound card | Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! |
| OS | Windows 98SE |