Comparing the technical merits of the Athlon and Pentium 4

JustHalf

I'd like to see people compare the technical merits of the Athlon and Pentium 4 chips that AMD and Intel (respectively) have released. The cost of the chips is not to be considered.

I don't want people saying that "AMD rocks, Intel sucks" or the like. If this is the case, explain why it is so, and your reasoning.

I'd like the following grounds covered at least:
* Performance at stock speeds
* Overclocking headroom in current and previous processes
* The impact of RAM/chipset/motherboard choice on the performance of the system
* Chip features and support

Thanks.

Gonzo

Ive been waiting to buy the new 2.53ghz pentium 4 from Dell which was released on may6th but they still havent brought it out to Dell ireland yet all other dell countries have had it for past weeks.

PPC

My xp 1900 running at 1.754 (12*146):

Quorthon

Originally posted by Gonzo
Ive been waiting to buy the new 2.53ghz pentium 4 from Dell which was released on may6th but they still havent brought it out to Dell ireland yet all other dell countries have had it for past weeks.

hehe they passed on the price cuts tho (which I was waiting for) so the 2.2 dropped €300 and I spent this money on a 21" trinitron monitor instead!!


Q

Gerry

How about discussing it, instead of spamming pictures of benchmarks?

JustHalf

Okay PPC. You want to show some real-world benchmarks?

PPC

Originally posted by JustHalf
Okay PPC. You want to show some real-world benchmarks?

Define realworld and i'll do em.
3dMark2001?
Quake3?
Halflife?

Just say what.

zAbbo

No matter what u do PPC, i think you`re gonna end up losing. The fact is that Gerry`s feathers have been ruffled in an ealier thread on gaming machines. I still can`t understand why Gery advised a guy on a budget to buy a big feck off P4 when the chap was on a budget(http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?threadid=54302)

It will be interesting so see what happens here?

Having read into this a little i`m siding with PPC his Sisoft Sandra benchies are pretty good. Although that is his own machine which is prolly done up to the hilt.

Gerry

What do you mean my feathers have been ruffled? I made some points, tried to back them up, and got completely ignored by PPC and yourself as well by the looks of it. I have stated that the p4 is more expensive, by about 60 - 70 euro. In my opinion its worth that extra cash. I don't call a p4 1.6 costing 205 euro a big "feck off" p4. I put together a full system based on that combination for under 1100 euro.

I was trying to put across the point that the p4 will overclock more, and end up faster overall. Note that the starting post in this thread asks for a discussion. You are siding with PPC because the benchies look pretty good? Why do you feel the need to take sides? This is supposed to be a discussion board, so why don't you read the first post again and post your opinions about the technical merits of the 2 chips.

elexes

i see both points on this but i think the post want physical and mathamatical proof that the p4 runs faster then the amd xp's

JustHalf

Originally posted by PPC
3dMark2001?
Quake3?
Halflife?

Unless people are going to use their computers to run SiSoft Sandra or 3DMark2001, then and example real-world benchmarks would be Quake III (at lowest detail and resolution settings to rule out graphics card bottlenecking as best you can).

And now, here comes the important part. This has to be COMPARED to a P4 system, preferably a Northwood. Is that "2GHz Pentium 4" even a Northwood? If not, you're comparing the latest Athlon core to a much older P4 core. And I've never been one to trust those built-in results, ever since my KT133A board beat their built-in score for memory performance on that chipset substantially at tweaked speeds, and lost badly at default settings (KT7A-RAID).

Quigs Snr

Quake 3 is not a great benchmark for todays huge machines. If you are going to compare, then you need identical hard disks, RAM, and Video Cards at a minimum.

PPC

Originally posted by JustHalf
Unless people are going to use their computers to run SiSoft Sandra or 3DMark2001, then and example real-world benchmarks would be Quake III (at lowest detail and resolution settings to rule out graphics card bottlenecking as best you can).

And now, here comes the important part. This has to be COMPARED to a P4 system, preferably a Northwood. Is that "2GHz Pentium 4" even a Northwood? If not, you're comparing the latest Athlon core to a much older P4 core. And I've never been one to trust those built-in results, ever since my KT133A board beat their built-in score for memory performance on that chipset substantially at tweaked speeds, and lost badly at default settings (KT7A-RAID).

Rightio. I should be home tonight so i'll becnh it then if i can get that damn timedemo to work.

Anyone tried the new HL one from Madonion?

Gerry

Well who has a p4 to run benches on? I built that p4 for a friend, so I no longer have it.

Quake3 scales to todays machines, I don't see the problem with it. It will keep running faster the more horsepower you throw at it, in a linear fashion.

PPC

Will i get my friend to run it on his 1.8Nw @ 2.1Ghz?

Gerry

Ya that sounds good. If the machines have slightly different graphics cards, you can minimize the effect by running everything on bottom detail, we only want to test the cpu/motherboard/ram combination.

PPC

He's got a 1.8NW, 512Mb DDR and a TH7 II mobo and a GF2.
I just need to clear the details and get him to get Q3.

sutty

Originally posted by JustHalf
If not, you're comparing the latest Athlon core to a much older P4 core.

I'd just like to point out that although the XP is a new chip, it is still based on the first athlons, there have not really been any changes made to the core it's self, more to what was used to make the chip, extra SSE codes put on it.....but under all that, it is a 4+ year old core made to compeat with the P3.....so infact it is the athlon that is getting the unfiar test. All this test shows is that the athlon although old is still going strong. If you want this test to be truly fair, it should be Athlon V P3. Again there are somethings that the athlon is good at and others that the P3/4 is good at. Also sandra is a real world test, as you do run it on your PC. However you are right in saying dont trust the pre-set scores, you should use a PC made with the other chip type to get a fair reading on both CPU's/chip sets/ram
also the P4 should be using DDR ram, as RDRAM can slow its CPU proformance down and give the P4 a unfiar memory bandwidth.
as stated in a post above, you need to have the componets of both systems the same....ie: Ram, HDD, 3dcard, ect.....

Gerry

Erm, the xp is about 10% faster at the same speed, it includes hardware prefetch as well as sse. Theres no point in saying that its unfair, the p3 is based on the 10 year old p6 design, so wheres the logic in that. The comparison compares the current chips from both companies. Intel are concentrating on the p4, not the p3. Having said that, if they wanted to, they could have a 1.8 - 2.0 ghz p3 out now, with a fast bus to make good use of ddr. A 1.4ghz p3 Tualatin keeps up quite well with an athlon xp 1600 - 1800, but it costs way more also.

sutty

Phil what I meant was that the Athlon was made to compeat with the P3, and not the P4. But you are right, the P3 was always a great chip, We done some tests our self when I first got my 850 athlon and we both set our chips to 1Gz.....if I remember right you kicked my athlon around

PPC

Yeah P3 was great. Had one till i went to my 1GHz athlon.
Always Intel before that.

JustHalf

Originally posted by sutty
Phil what I meant was that the Athlon was made to compeat with the P3, and not the P4. But you are right, the P3 was always a great chip, We done some tests our self when I first got my 850 athlon and we both set our chips to 1Gz.....if I remember right you kicked my athlon around

If the Athlon XP was released to compete with the PIII, then AMD are seriously retarded.

Inspector Gadget

Firstly, there have been three different Athlon cores:

* K7 ("Classic")
* Thunderbird
* Palomino (XP)

As well as three Pentium III cores:

* Katmai
* Coppermine
* Tualatin

...and two Pentium IV cores:

* Williamette
* Northwood

As they all have different performance characteristics relative to each other, it's specious to say that the Athlon was designed to compete with the Pentium III, because every device involved has evolved, more than once at that, not to mention there being the occasional new entry to the scene (the Pentium IV), so basically the Athlons have been designed and updated to keep pace (sometimes leading, sometimes trailing) with whatever Intel spew out, and vice versa for Intel with it's PIII/PIV's competing with whatever AMD produce.

Additionally, especially when comparing the PIV family to the Athlon family, they're both designed to go fast, but in different ways. The Athlon family executes far more instructions per clock cycle than a P4 ever will (many shallow pipelines as opposed to fewer, longer ones), but the P4 goes through an awful lot more clock cycles, so they (more-or-less, depending on what applications you're using and who's fastest this week) line up.

Finally, when it comes to benchmarks, surely if you're using an application (such as Quake III) to test the relative performace of CPUs, won't the CPU family that the compiler used to build the application is optimised for (in all likelihood, this means Intel) be at (at the very least) a slight advantage?

Only my 2c, but...
Gadget

PPC

Thats why i used Sandra cause i dont think it was designed for Intel's.
Should we bench it on the system aswell?

Dazza01

Originally posted by Gonzo
Ive been waiting to buy the new 2.53ghz pentium 4 from Dell which was released on may6th but they still havent brought it out to Dell ireland yet all other dell countries have had it for past weeks.

Gonzo,

Just to let you know, The 2.5ghz is actually available from Dell ireland at the moment.....

I saw few being sent back for damage by the muppets in Dell

JustHalf

Gadget, if every application is optimised for one chip and not for the other, then the "theoretical performance" of the chip doesn't matter.

_CreeD_

From a different perspective (ie. Real world, non-gaming). I use 3 different PCs for music, Sonar 2.0 as the sequencer.
2 are Pentium 4s, 1.7 (work machine) and 2.0Ghz-(Northwood core), the other is an Athlon XP running at ~1.64Ghz.
The most intensive song I've done to date uses 22 tracks, with 11 instances of DXi's (Virtual Synths, VERY cpu hungry, the ones I used dont use much ram or stream from the HDD so Im ignoring those for the mo.). If you're not used to using a sequencer then to put it simply when you run out of CPU power your DXi's start to dropout/stall (also affected by the soundcard, but in this case all 3 have Audigy's).
On playback the 1.7Ghz P4 drops out about 3/4 of the time.
The 2.Ghz P4 drops out rarely, maybe 1/5.
The AthlonXp 1.64Ghz never drops out.


For game performance the machine configs are too different for a fair test.

Inspector Gadget

Originally posted by JustHalf
Gadget, if every application is optimised for one chip and not for the other, then the "theoretical performance" of the chip doesn't matter.

Well, yes and no - the fact remains that they're both trying to execute the same instruction set, more or less - it's just a matter of how good each chip is at doing that, isn't it?

All I'm saying is that an application that's been written with the intention of being run on a specific CPU may not be an ideal model for a benchmark. Not that I believe there is an ideal model, mind you.

Gadget

JustHalf

Of course not. For example, Intel's SysMark wouldn't be the best tool to use when comparing the P4 to the Athlon (it would still be fairly useful when comparing different P4's though)

However, if you're using a widely used application (like Quake III and the nVidia drivers of course) then you don't need to worry about whether or not the compiler used was optimised for either platform. This is because you should care far more about how well the application you want to run on your machine runs on your machine.

Personally, I don't give a damn if my machine has a lower SiSoft Sandra Multimedia benchmark than a given Athlon if, because of the chip, it plays Quake III faster.

It's also interesting to see people compare stock speed P4's against overclocked Athlons... given that your FSB is probably higher than standard.

Inspector Gadget

Originally posted by JustHalf
It's also interesting to see people compare stock speed P4's against overclocked Athlons... given that your FSB is probably higher than standard.

It certainly is - although again that's not black-and-white either as stock Athlons can have FSBs up to 266MHz where stock P4's can have FSBs up to 533MHz! Either way you look at it, it's not going to be "fair", is it?

To my mind, anyway, the whole matter of benchmarks is a bit dodgy to begin with. I think the "speed" of a machine is subjective - if it feels fast when I use it, I'm a happy bunny.

Gadget

_CreeD_

Originally posted by Inspector Gadget



To my mind, anyway, the whole matter of benchmarks is a bit dodgy to begin with. I think the "speed" of a machine is subjective - if it feels fast when I use it, I'm a happy bunny.

Gadget

Exactly. Whatever does the best job at the things you want it to do, for the money you're prepared to pay for it.
It doesn't matter a damn which one gets a higher benchmark if it won't run the specific things you want as it should. Why bother running things like Q3 at lower settings to stress the CPU if you're going to play it high enough to make your VidCard the bottleneck (Which everyone will logically enough).

JustHalf

Strangely enough, the GeForce 4 Ti4600 is CPU limited in Quake III at least up until 1024x768 (full detail), and I believe it's limited at 1280x1024 (full detail).

The reason for running the engine at the low resolutions is to guarantee that the graphics card isn't interfering with the result, so that what each chip contributes to the performance can be better seen.

Unfortunately, even at 640x480 this isn't always the case, as Phil can testify when playing Quake III with a GeForce 2 MX on a 1.6NW @ 2.5GHz (it wasn't a gaming machine, by the way). But you get the idea.

Gerry

It is to show the relative performance of motherboard/cpu combinations. Quake3 is very good at highlighting differences in bandwidth and latency.

As for benchmarks, well this topic wasn't supposed to be about benchmarks, it was supposed to be a general discussion about the merits of the 2 architectures.

This all came out of a discussion about what chip to get in a new machine, and it was put across that the athlon is far faster than the p4. About 2 months ago, they were roughly level overall, the athlon being much stronger in some things, the p4 in others. Now I think the p4 has pulled ahead, the top end p4 is faster overall than a top end athlon.

With regard to bus speeds, well the 533mhz p4 bus is an official speed, so I don't see the problem with it. AMD are strangling the athlon by not giving it an official 333mhz fsb, they have admitted that all their efforts are currently going towards the hammer.

Back to benchmarking, the athlon is optimized to run code compiled for the p6 architecture, it gains much less from optimizaton than the p4. Basically it does a great job of keeping itself fully occupied (ie all execution units executing instructions ) as much as possible. Besides, the palomino has sse, so even if there was sse code in quake3 (and I think most of the benefit actually comes from optimizations in nvidias q3 drivers), an intel compiler gives no advantage to the p4, until you start adding in sse2 code.

So, besides the few apps which are optimized for the p4, I don't think any other normal, commercial x86 apps favour one architecture over another.

BabyEater

At the minute the P4 has the advantage over the XP as a 2.5Ghz P4 outperforms an XP2200. There is very few benchmarks where the XP can touch the P4.
I think the P4 also has greater overclocking headroom as the new thoroghbreds while disipate less heat have a smaller die size so dissipate more heat per square mm. They should have a heat spreader as the P4.
The P4 is only at its best tho with the Rambus, DDR hits performance.
And i also like the P4's thermal protection as i could have done with some when i fried me XP.
Thats what i think anyway. When i bought me yoke tho it was the other way round where the XP had the advantage over the P4 it just keeps changing and as far as i can see this is Intels time for performance .

SickBoy

Originally posted by PPC
He's got a 1.8NW, 512Mb DDR and a TH7 II mobo and a GF2.
I just need to clear the details and get him to get Q3.

Dont mean to be picky here but the TH7 II uses RDRAM, just incase anyone is considering purchasing one.

cerebus

Originally posted by JustHalf
I'd like to see people compare the technical merits of the Athlon and Pentium 4 chips that AMD and Intel (respectively) have released.

I'd like the following grounds covered at least:
* Chip features and support

I don't know if this is the kind of thing you are looking for, but a guy a few cubes over used to work for Intel. We were discussing the relative performance of AMD and Intel uP cores recently, and he had some interesting things to say about the P4.

One of the things he mentioned was that part of the integer unit in a P4 runs at 2x the core frequency - so if you have a 2.5GHz core then part of the die is running at 5GHz. This gives a clock period of 200ps, which is pretty nifty! (Some devices I've worked on have used 100ps or more of clock uncertainty, which would blow that timing budget completely!)

I must see if he has anything else interesting to say about the different architectures used by AMD and Intel - his knowledge of AMD devices is pretty limited though. Also, he worked on the P3 so I don't know how up to date his info about the P4 is

On the fab side, I have heard that Intel should have no issues with moving to a low-k dielectric process (maybe they have already?). The use of a low-k dielectric gives some nice speed and power benefits. I'm not sure how AMD is fixed in this area, but I do know a lot of the merchant silicon foundries (TSMC, UMC, Chartered, etc.) have had trouble getting their low-k process up and running. This might be an issue for AMD in the future maybe?

PPC

Originally posted by SickBoy

Dont mean to be picky here but the TH7 II uses RDRAM, just incase anyone is considering purchasing one.

Yeah sorry.
He was getting a board with DDR but changed it.
Whoops:rolleyes:

Gerry

Intels process is a bit ahead of amd's at the minute. AMD were due to use SOI (Silicon on insulator) technology in the thoroughbred and barton, that slipped to only being in the barton, now it won't be in the barton at all.

The 0.13 micron amd process is not showing near the improvements in heat and headroom that the intel one did, this is because amd used a lot of tricks from 0.13 micron process in their 0.18 micron process, as far back as the tbird, and more extensively in the palomino. I think amd are having major problems getting their 0.13 micron process running smoothly, but I'm sure they will sort this out.

The thing about the p4's integer units, is that despite running at 2x the frequency, the p4 still has pretty poor integer performance.

Heres an excellent article about the p4 architecture:

http://arstechnica.com/cpu/01q2/p4andg4e/p4andg4e-1.html

Matt Simis

Well, as seen on the HW tweaking Board, I have changed from an AthlonXP 1912mhz (XP2500) to a P4 1.8 running at 2.2.

Im using a BD7 motherboard with PC2700 ram.
While 3DMark may have fallen out of favour, for what its worth, the P4 2.2 did outperform the supposedly faster AthlonXP by about 3%. The P4 CPU was cheaper than the Athlon XP (it was a AXP 1900 originally).

I think there are two ways of comparing the platforms (platforms, not CPUs, a CPU is nothing without a good platform).

(A) Absolute performance at any cost.

or

(B) Price Performance


I think most can (sometimes grudgingly) agree that the P4 wins in category A. A P4 2.53 with 1066MHz RDRAM is untouchable, and you can of course overclock it fairly easily.

Category B is much closer. For the lowest end, its the "P4" Celeron 1.7GHz versus the Duron\low end AXP. I would tend to favour AMD in this area. When you get to the mid ground, its a bit of a toss up. AMD if you dont overclock, Intel if you do (P4 1.6NW running at 2.4GHz is unlikely to be beaten, by say an AXP 1900 or 2000 even)

For the high end price performance argument, I feel AMD is sorely lacking a competitive "high end" part, it tops out at the 2200 (just this week), whereas Intel has plenty to offer all the way upto 2.53. The AMD Tbred is a disappointment to me, but I imagine\hope that Hammer will rectify this situation.


As a by the way, I have changed CPU to a P4 2.26 (533FSB) this week, and without using my chilled water cooler, just the Intel Heatsink&Thermal Pad it can run 3DMark with 100% stability at 2.85GHz. 3GHz+ is the aim with Chilled cooling and Voltage mods to come later.



Matt

Gerry

eh nice one matt. Post up some benchmarks there

Inspector Gadget

At the moment, it's clear from the way things are going that the high-end Intel parts are faster and will continue to be faster, until AMD get their fab processes sorted out.

However, all-conquering CPU performance isn't everything - I just did a quick price comparison, and according to www.komplett.ie the fastest Intel part (the 2.53GHz P4), at E900, is just shy of three times the price of AMD's current fastest part, the XP2200 at E306.

While that's a slightly skewed example, as the price of parts increases exponentially compared to how close they are to the "top of the heap", so to speak, it still speaks volumes.

Now, if we try to pick a "sweet spot" as regards bang-for-buck for the Athlon XP, as a semi-reasonable measure of the CPUs most likely to sell in volume (at the moment), it appears to me that the chip with the biggest price differentials either side of it is the Athlon XP2000+ at E204.

With the P4, the 2.2GHz and 2.26GHz parts represent solid value compared to their faster counterparts (based on the assumption that the OEM pricing trend will follow the retail pricing trend), but at E350 are substantially more expensive (70% more expensive) than the Athlon XP parts listed above.

Throw a
benchmark into the mix and the suggestion is that both running DDR RAM, there isn't much in it. Interesting...

Gadget

Gerry

Agreed, but most people here will be able to overclock the p4, and you don't need to buy a 2.2 or 2.26 to do that, a 1.6 or 1.8 will get you 2.4 - 2.6 ghz. If you will never be overclocking, amd is better value, otherwise its not.

koneko

I'm not sure what the fluck AMD are playing at, but their CPUs are getting worse and worse at overclocking as time goes on.

The TBird were great, the XPs were kinda bad, and the Thoroughbeds are meant to be even worse.

Yet the Intel CPUs are getting great OC'ing out of them. Sorry, did I say great? I meant brilliant.

If you want to get a CPU at the moment and get the highest speed possible with it, you're going to be very disappointed with yer Athlon XP.

Inspector Gadget

True, but because it's purely FSB-based, the overclocking will be dependent on your motherboard being able to change the FSB/PCI speed dividers (which most of the current P4 boards do, I understand) and your RAM and expansion cards being able to handle higher interface speeds (I've heard that NICs are particularly tricky).

So, to be honest, a proportion of the P4's "overclockability" is down to the fact that motherboard designers working with Intel CPU hardware have had to deal with permanently multiplier-locked CPUs than the AMD boys (as the older Socket A Athlons and Durons were easy to "fix" in this regard). That, and the fact that Via chipsets have a well-earned bad reputation, but that because of they're everywhere in AMDland that AMD themselves aren't doing chipsets any more, unlike Intel...

Having said that, Intel's silicon has always been "better" somehow than AMDs - the AMD stuff tends to be released quite close to its physical limits (heat, speed etc.) all the time (continuous research in semiconductor physics permitting) whereas Intel's generally seems to have greater "legs" (so to speak) - maybe they're at an advantage considering they've been the ones dictating how the x86 instruction set will change every time the processor's bus width increases (8 -> 16, 16->32, etc.) and therefore have a "head start". With talk of poor initial results from the prototype Hammers abounding, it'll be interesting to see what AMD can do to pull the rabbit out of the hat this time.

Gadget

Gerry

You get a 33% overclock without putting anything out of spec on any of the current p4 boards, and with the i845 chipset, you can keep the pci at sensible speeds at crazy fsb's.

The sis 645 chipset doesn't appear to have a 1/5 pci divider, but the machine still ran fine at 40mhz pci with a realtek nic ( which are normally dodgy, but perhaps this was more tolerant of fsb because it was integrated, I dunno).

Inspector Gadget

...I can't say that I've done a whole pile of heavy-duty FSB overclocking - I've never really had to, thankfully, but on a couple of occasions that I've tried, things have started "going west" (so to speak) when the PCI bus is running at as comparatively "low" as 36MHz - I think it's quite likely that Realtek RTL-based NICs that are to blame, too, for what it's worth.

To be frank, though, right now the Intel rigs look much more appealing if (like many of us here) you want to crank it up a couple of notches...

Gadget

Matt Simis

What type of benches do you want?

From memory (over the weekend) I got the following Sisoft Sandra Scores (which P4s score poorly on):

5800 CPU Arith
3600 (approx) SSE2 FPU
11,400 Multimedia Bench.
2620MB/s (for both results) Memory.

In Commanche 4 benchmark, at 1024x768, all effects on Max, I got 58FPS. Slow memory is holding everything back at the moment.

I will be getting new RAM soon, but for the moment Im using cheapy Komplett PC2700 TwinMos ram, at the slowest settings in the bios. The system is running at 3000MHz, 176MHz FSB (704MHz 4x pumped!), 176MHz RAM (DDR 352).

The PCI speed is run in spec at 33MHz, as the bios features 3 lock speed settings: 33MHz, 37.5MHz and 44MHz. It also offers standard dividers (3x, 4x, 5x) too. CPU voltage is 1.75V.


What was funny was that I had to adjust the software program Motherboard Monitor's "CPU Scale" to display Values upto 3100MHz, instead of the standard setting of only upto 2000Mhz.



Matt

Gerry

Extremely nice. If you could try quake3 benchmarks that would be great, run at lowest res, and lowest detail. Then go into game options, switch simple items on, and everything else off.

extract four.dm_66 from \baseq3\pak6.pak and put in \baseq3\demos as four.dm_67

then at q3 console:

/timedemo 1
/demo four

I got 310 fps on a p4 1.6A @ 2.48 ghz ( 155 fsb ). I had to run at 640 x 480 instead of 512 x 384 though, because the monitor won't run at 512.

I think the best ddr around is samsung pc2700, ( any module that uses samsung pc2700 chips should be good ). In reviews, it has been run at 200/400 at fastest settings, and 220/440 at slower settings. I tried to dig up a review on google, but I can't find it.

Matt Simis

Hi Gerry,


Ill benchmark it tonight. Why extract the file from the PAK file and then run the benchmark? Does the extraction process "ingame" really effect performance?

For all you AMD fans, Ill be getting a Tbred when Komplett get stock, and the system right beside mine will then have a Tbred and same gfx card, GF4 Ti 4200. Should make a good comparison.

Im very interested in how the TBred fairs.


Matt

JustHalf

You have to extract it because otherwise Quake III can't find it

SickBoy

Got 357 FPS @ 640x480x16 with the demo Gerry recomended. System is;
P4 1.7 willy not overclocked
GeForce 3 64Meg
1GB PC800 RDRAM
ABit TH7II
Command line was d:\quake3\quake3.exe +set s_initsound 0