• Athlon 2400+ XP
• 512MB DDR333 memory
• Asus A7N8x Deluxe nForce2 using Asus 116 drivers
• 60GB WD Hard Drive 2MB Cache 8.9ms seek time
• Onboard sound disabled
• 19" 1600x1200 monitor
• DirectX 9.0
• AIW VE using Catalyst 3.1 (latest ATI drivers)
• ATI AIW 9700 Pro using Catalyst 3.1
  

Benchmarks

• Quake3 Arena demo 4 build 1.30
• 3DMark 2003
• 3DMark 2001SE build 330
• Serious Sam Little Trouble Demo Extreme Settings demo no anisotropy
• Dronez-mark
• Unreal Tournament 2003 Performance Test

I decided when writing this review to benchmark the AIW VE against the AiW 9700 Pro to give a look at performance across the high-end AIW and the AIW VE. The only PCI video cards that I have are a S3 Virge and a Rage Pro Turbo, hardly competitive with a Radeon 7500. Using a Radeon 7500 in this comparison wouldn't be a apples to apples comparison, as the clock speeds are completely different (290/190 versus 250/250 on the AIW VE). Also of note, I used the latest Catalyst 3.1 drivers on ATI's site and DirectX 9.0.

As to choice of benchmarks, I included Gamepyre's standard set of benchmarks for video card reviews. Dronez-mark is a benchmark designed for Geforce3 level cards. 3DMark 2001SE is a benchmark for DirectX 7/8 video cards. 3DMark 2003 is designed for DirectX 9 level cards. I included it because we're going to be using this benchmark for all reviews from now on. Quake3 Arena is the standard gaming benchmark, and finally Unreal Tournament 2003 is the latest gaming benchmark.

Note also, that I feel 1024x768 is the resolution most people game on. While the 7500 (which the AIW VE is based upon), may be slow in most of these benchmarks, the fact is, it's good enough for the vast majority of people. I also detest using "medium" and low settings. To be consistent, I will be using the max quality settings in Quake3, Serious Sam Second Edition and Unreal Tournament 2003.