What would any good article be without a Quake 3 benchmark?

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It's no secret that Quake 3 is one of the most bandwidth-hungry applications around, and here we see that illustrated yet again. The SDRAM-equipped Pentium 4 looks rather pathetic, turning in results only 50% better than the Pentium III 800, despite a 200% increase in clockspeed. The RDRAM-equipped platform turns in a much more respectable result.

http://media.hardwareanalysis.com/articles/small/10420.gif" alt="Hardware Analysis - Intel Pentium 4 2.40GHz" border=0>
As always, we like to include this graph as a reminder that, just as the processor or memory can be a bottleneck, so can the video card, or any other part of the system. If high-resolution gaming is your cup of tea, your upgrade dollars are probably better spent elsewhere.