Graphics Benchmark

I ran 3DMark06 on my old computer and my new computer.

The old computer has a score of 211 for 3D performance with shader model 2.0 and CPU score of 686. The overall score is 448.

The new computer has a score of 397 for 3D performance with shader model 2.0 and CPU score of 2101. The overall score is 1227.

The motherboard vendor claims that they could get a score of 1500, maybe that's with a more powerful CPU? The performance of the onboard graphics is related to the amount and speed of onboard RAM, so if I can overclock the RAM and the GPU core then maybe I can do better.

What if I add another Radeon HD 3870? Looking at other benchmark results with the same CPU and with the HD 3870, scores range from 8258 to 12355, with 3D performance of at least 10x improvement from my results. That's a pretty drastic difference! The 3D rendering used in the benchmark would go from my 3 frames per second to 30 frames per second. Looks like if I want to enjoy any recent games I would need to get that extra graphics acceleration.