System Review – PC-Club Silencer

Gaming Performance

Gaming performance will be interesting on the Pentium M. The large L2 cache helps out quite a bit. Although, we expect the 3800+ to still win by a decent margin.

With the 6800GT, the Silencer tends to outperform the SN25P by a small amount in Doom 3, and the gap becomes a gulf when we enable 4xAA. This is typical of Doom 3, of course. While Doom 3 is more GPU limited, Half-Life 2 is clearly running into a CPU limitation. The City 17 map in particular hammers the CPU, and the SN25P comes out ahead by as much as 35%. In all of the tests, the use of CL2 RAM had a very minor impact on performance – around 3%, and sometimes even less. At present, then, there's not much reason to fault PC-Club's decision to use cheaper CL2.5 RAM.

We threw in 3DMark03 scores just for fun. We use 3DMark03 in a looping mode for our stress test, so we figured that we might as well give you the numbers. It's not a surprise that the 6800GT comes out faster than the X800Pro, particularly since it's running with the 6800Ultra clock speed on the GPU. What is interesting is that the CPU scores also show a large advantage with the 6800GT configuration. CPU benchmarks don't generally depend on the graphics card in our experience, which is why we don't put too much stock in the 3DMark results.