PiFast

A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory.

The extra 60MHz shaves about 5 seconds from the calculations. PiFast is fairly memory intensive, so the extra speed makes quite a difference in the performance.

3D Mark 2001 SE

Another synthetic game benchmark, but at low resolutions, tends to stress the subsystem more than the video card. Given the power of the Radeon 9700 Pro, benchmarks were done at the default settings, 1024x768.

The faster memory speeds do improve the 3D Mark scores, but don't expect any magical 1000 3D Mark gains. Needless to say, if "benchmarking" is important to you, faster ram doesn't hurt.

Quake 3: Arena

It's debatable whether this benchmark still has any merit when it comes to testing video cards, but I find it useful when running our CPU and subsystem tests. Tests were run at the "Fastest" settings, at 640x480.