Intel Celeron 600 "Coppermine128"

Here is when we begin to see some of the real performance difference. Simply moving to the 100MHz memory bus in Quake III provides for a 14% performance improvement.

The reason the improvement is so noticeable here is because Quake III, unlike SYSMark 2000, is a very specific benchmark in that we aren't averaging in the performance of the setup under business applications with the performance of the setup under Quake III. Combine that with the fact that Quake III is very memory/graphics intensive (it is a game after all) and you get a pretty big difference simply by using a 100MHz memory bus.

At 1024 x 768 x 32 the GeForce in our test bed is acting as a limiting factor in the benchmark but even in spite of the fill rate limitation here we still see a 6% improvement in performance caused by the 100MHz memory bus. At such a high resolution there is definitely more AGP texturing going on which could be contributing to the still measurable performance difference between 66MHz vs 100MHz.