16. Unreal Tournament 2004

Unreal Tournament 2004 is a much-loved shoot'em-up, and enables easy comparison of system and graphics performance. In systems with the Mobile Sempron 2800+ the results scare in line with RAM speed. Even when used on a Turion 64 MT-34 the benchmark also scales the same way. The results from the Pentium M and Turion 64 systems don't differ significantly, even though the latter can take advantage of higher memory bandwidth when fast DDR400 RAM is installed. One can only speculate that the graphics card isn't able to handle data fast enough from the CPU to further boost performance. In other words, the graphics card is what prevents a higher score from being achieved in this case.

3DMark05 (Synthetic DirectX 9 Benchmark)

The 3DMark05 is the latest graphics benchmark from Futuremark. Because it exercises all of the features in DirectX 9 its built-in displays are best simply counted, to see how many each computer can complete. Because of its high level of shading and detail, 3DMark 2005 acts primarily as a graphics benchmark.

These results recall what we observed for Unreal Tournament 2004. The graphics card obviously hinders achieving a higher score. Because both the Turion 64 and the Mobile Sempron clearly have enough headroom to do more, a lack of memory bandwidth can't explain why results don't scale up when faster RAM is installed. Even the Pentium M system can't really do itself justice here.

In the 3DMark 2005 CPU test, AMD's Turion takes the lead by a nose, owing to its fast, integrated memory controller, particularly when DDR 400 RAM is installed.