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.

Unreal Tournament 2003

We used the scripts written by , which are excellent tools in testing various resolutions and detail levels. We selected the CPU test, which uses lower quality settings to offload the strain from the video card.

As we can see in the two real-world gaming benchmarks, there are tangible gains with faster ram. Although a faster CPU and video card will make a larger difference, the ram still plays an important part in creating a faster system overall.

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