Test System Setup

Processor(s): AMD Athlon 64 3500+

Motherboard(s): Biostar AMD GeForce 6100-M9

Memory: 2 x 512MB PC3200 RAM

Hard Disk(s): 2 x Seagate 80GB SATA in RAID-1 (mirror)

Operating System Used: Microsoft Windows XP SP2

Drivers Used: nVidia ForceWare 81.85, ATI Catalyst 5.10 and DX9c

Our test system was designed to test the capabilities of the board running a standard installation of Windows XP, so other than disabling visual themes (except for PCMark05 which requires it), we left everything on, including audio. The hard drives were connected in a RAID-1 mirror, which is a reasonable real-life implementation.

To give an indication of where the GeForce 6100 sits in the grand scheme of things, we also ran the visual benchmarks against an ATI Radeon X800 Pro. This wasn't to try and compare the two cards - obviously a dedicated X800 Pro would flatten pretty much any integrated graphics controller with ease - but just to get an impression of how the 6100 could perform, and what recommendations to make based on that performance.

To that end, we didn't perform any GPU overclocking or high quality visual effects benchmarking. It was always fairly clear that the GeForce 6100 was going to struggle even at 1024x768/noAA/noAF, so it would have been quite unreasonable to push it even further beyond its capacity and then try to come up with a meaningful interpretation of the results, other than "don't play games with this".

PCMark

Version and / or Patch Used: PCMark04 1.30 and PCMark05 1.10

Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com

Product Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/products/pcmark04/

Buy It Here

PCMark is a multipurpose benchmark, suited for benchmarking all kinds of PCs, from laptops to workstations, as well as across multiple Windows operating systems. This easy-to-use benchmark makes professional strength benchmarking software available even to novice users. PCMark consists of a series of tests that represent common tasks in home and office programs. PCMark also covers many additional areas outside the scope of other MadOnion.com benchmarks.

The PCMark benchmarking apps perform system, CPU, memory, graphics and HDD tests - the end result is a weighted average of all these. Overall the Biostar 6100-M9 performed quite well, proving its worth as a powerful basis for a workstation. PCMark05 is a more aggressive test that PCMark04, and also requires Windows XP visual themes to be turned on, so there is a slightly higher memory footprint and more strenuous graphics testing.

The board performed well nevertheless, with a drop in score of around 30%. In the individual tests, however, the notable weak point was the graphics testing scores - in both PCMark benchmarks the graphics scores were around 60% lower than the next highest score (CPU), and almost 70% lower than the highest (HDD). So the overall scores were dragged down by the GeForce 6100 onboard GPU.