The video card used for all 4 systems is the Ati radeon X1950 PRO 512mb that I presented in the beginning. So all 4 platforms have the exact same card!

System 1: nforce3 250GB
Athlon 64 3400
2*1gb DDR400 at 3-3-3-8 CR1T
Abit NF8
WD raptor 150gb
Radeon X1950 PRO

System 2: nforce4
Athlon 64 3400
2*1gb DDR400 at 3-3-3-8 CR1T
Abit NV8
Radeon X1950 PRO
Kingston 960gb A400 for system
WD raptor 74gb for storage tests

System 3: ULI M1689

Athlon 64 3400
2*1gb DDR400 at 3-3-3-8 CR1T
Abit KU8
Radeon X1950 PRO
Kingston A400 240gb for the system
WD raptor 74gb for hard drive tests

System 4: VIA K8T800 PRO

Athlon 64 3400
2*1gb DDR400 at 3-3-3-8 CR1T
Abit KV8 PRO
Radeon X1950 PRO
WD raptor 74gb

As you have seen in the screenshots I used Radeon 10.2 drivers for NVIDIA and VIA systems. However in the case of ULI I had to use OMEGA drivers - latest version - because the system would lock up with any bridged AGP radeons. Tested with X1650 PRO and X1950 PRO. In addition AGP secondary latency timer in the BIOS has to be set to the highest value for the system to boot XP after you installed the omega drivers!

With X1950 PRO AGP Quake 4 and FEAR should be playable also on AGP systems as period correct reviews show it to be significantly more powerful than 7600 GT / 7800 GS. It is enough also for NFS Most Wanted 2005, but without full screen anti-aliasing.

Before going into chapter 1 I will talk about the problems encountered with radeon cards with the Rialto chip.
Every single NVIDIA card installed without a single problem - be it native AGP such as geforce 5500 or with the HSI bridge such as geforce 7600gt/7800gs. Every single driver - 93.71, 175.19, 197.77 also installed just fine. There are no errors or BSOD's with nvidia video cards; they all work just fine in all the systems.
Now with native AGP radeon cards such as 9600xt that I used when first configuring the systems and installing Windows, the drivers and all the software there were no problems encountered. Stability testing - Pcmark 2005 in a loop - was also fine. No BSOD, no benchmark errors. However with bridged AGP cards I met countless times when the system hang, crashed to desktop for no reason and no entry in the event viewer and subpar performance! I tried several versions from different "drivers family": 6.xx, 7.xx, 8.xx. 9.xx, 10.2, omega. Each time the solution was either something completely unrelated to the graphics card: change the SATA port of the raptor drive for the VIA system!!! for example; or simply installing XP from scratch with the same hardware configuration and it just worked!!!; OR trying all the driver versions i wrote above.
In the end I managed to test all the systems with the official radeon 10.2 drivers - the latest for X1k series that have the best performance after installing and configuring the systems 5 times each!
Also as you have seen in the screenshots I used Raptor 74gb for all the systems - so XP installed all over again - I did not uninstalled nvidia drivers and installed radeon ones - different hard drives so no conflicts between nvidia and radeon drivers.
ULI system is a special case that i already talked about.