Performance

We didn't use many benchmarks mainly because there is almost no difference in performance between GeForce based video cards. The feature set, overclockability and price may differ, but the performance is flat. We used for comparison a Hercules 3D Prophet II Pro, a very good video card that succeeded early this year to impress many people, including us. We tested the video cards only in 1024 x 768 because in lower resolutions the results are not representative, they may be CPU dependent and the overclocking doesn't make such big difference.
Below you can find the Quake III Arena 1024 x 768 timedemo1 results. You can play Quake III Arena in higher than 1024 x 768 resolutions, I doubt that you will find new games which are nice playable in 1280 x 1024.

As you can see Excalibur performed quite well, not so good as Hercules at the default frequency, but the difference is small. Overclocking brings almost 20FPS more which is quite a lot. Due to the higher memory overclocking Pine card succeeded to outperform Hercules 3D Prophet II Pro.

In 3DMark 2001 we experienced almost the same difference. Once again at default frequency Excalibur performed better than Hercules overclocked.

Serious Sam game reached the beta stage, but it has been used as a benchmark from quite a while. The game engine is advanced and it uses many new features of the latest GPUs. Do not expect to as many FPS as you experience with Quake. Maybe that in two years we will see 150FPS in Serious Sam, but until then not even the new GeForce3 TI 500 is able to deliver 100FPS. In Serious Sam Excalibur performed when overclocked a little bit worse than Hercules 3D Prophet II Pro.

Overall the card provides a good performance, even when compared with Hercules 3D Prophet II Pro.