The Evesham Prestige R - the Nvidia machine - came loaded with the latest 93.71 drivers and there were no updates available on the Foxconn website so we ran 3DMarks 05 and 06 to get an idea of the performance and weren’t surprised to see that it was fairly rotten. 3DMark06 didn’t return a Shader Model 3.0 score as the GeForce 6100 doesn’t support High Dynamic Range lighting at the same time as anti-aliasing. The frame rates were low but the pictures looked good so we pressed on and installed The Sims 2, Lego Star Wars II and Myst V:End of Ages, hugely popular titles despite the sneers of some on the first-person perspective shooter camp.
These games aren’t graphically intensive in the mould of Half Life 2 and Age of Empires III but they put a fair load on the graphics. Sims 2 requires a minimum 32MB T&L graphics card while Lego Star Wars II specifies graphics that have 64MB of memory with Vertex and Pixel Shader capability and Myst V demands a 32MB DirectX 9.0c compliant video card supporting 32-bit colour.
That’s clear enough if you have a reasonable level of technical knowledge but we suspect it would sound like gobbledegook to the average punter on the High Street.
All three games played reasonably well, although Lego Star Wars II was initially very slow and then speeded up, and we were presented with a full range of settings for graphical quality. In the case of Lego we chose to enable bump mapping, bloom filtering and plastic reflections while in Sims 2 we left the default settings which were High. Myst V is an odd case as the screen is displayed as a series of still images. All three games looked good and played acceptably well, and far better than you could have hoped to see on integrated graphics.
| Games Test Results [in frames per second] | |||
| Prestige R
Shipped Driver |
Prestige R Plus
Shipped Driver |
Prestige R Plus
Updates Driver |
|
| The Sims 2 | 15
800 x 600 |
24
1,024 x 768 |
35
1,024 x 768 |
| Lego Star Wars II | 11
1,024 x 768 |
28
1,024 x 768 No eye candy |
28
1,024 x 768 No eye candy |
| Myst V | 24
1,024 x 768 |
24
1,024 x 768 |
27
1,024 x 768 |
COMMENTS
Intel have advantages
It's nice that windows vista gets lots of nice press, but I'm more concerned with the fact that AMd have yet to offer anything in the way of secure drivers to me as a linux user. intel on the other hand are co-operative and have developers in there doing their thing.
The support difference means I could never buy the amd/nvidia anyway. it'd be too risky.
My scores
When I was using my 6150 I got a score of 3.0 then I installed a 7600GS and now have a 4.5. I didnt think Vista was usable with the 6150 it was too slow to drag windows around. The 7600GS is a pretty good option for Vista since you can get the XFX one which has no fan, just a heat sink, and gets you a high enough score.
Could not find performance comparison for 6100
But from Tom's Hardware charts comparing a 6200 to a 7300 GS, the later has more than 17 times the 3dmark06 performance. This should tell you a little about why it matters what the chip is. One price point I found was a 7100 GS for about $52. Open platform means really the person buying the computer could ask for a gaming computer, even a low end one, and get a card in this vicinity, with hugely more graphic performance than a 6100.
Follow Up
Notice the price difference of 50 which I guess is about $97. Now......for $97 you can buy a rather nice graphics card........................for example for about $76 you could get a nice 7300GT (better than the previously mentioned GS), with more than 30 times the 3dMark06 performance of a 6200. So the AMD system would still be less than the Intel System, but have 30 times the performance of the tested system.....Hmmmmmm.......guess that's a little closer to Apples to Apples, price wise......make sense yet??
Missed the point
You have all missed the point of the article, anyone with any average to high level of knowledge with computers wouldn’t buy either system in the first place unless its for office use only.
The point of the article is that the everyday user doesn’t know what they are buying, the two systems are "typical" systems at the low end of the market, which is exactly the kind of systems people would consider buying.
It is irrelevant that the hardware is old, and can not be directly compared because of tech differences, simply because that is what is on offer today off the shelf’s for a similar price.
From a suppliers point of view these systems can be purchased very cheap and sold for considerable profit, this is where the money is made as margins on high end systems are comparatively low, thus this is exactly what kind of reviews the "new" user needs to read.
