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HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM:
We tested the Gigabyte GV-R96X128D on an i875P based
Albatron PX875 Pro motherboard, powered by an Intel Pentium
4-C 2.4GHz CPU. The first thing we did when
configuring this test system was enter the BIOS and load the
"High Performance Defaults". Then we set the memory to
operate at 200MHz in dual-channel mode, with the CAS Latency
and other memory timings set by the SPD, and set the AGP
aperture size to 256MB. The hard drive was then formatted,
and Windows XP Professional with SP1 was installed.
When the installation was complete, we installed the Intel
chipset drivers and then installed all of the necessary
drivers for the rest of our components. Windows
Messenger was then disabled and removed from the system,
Auto-Updating, System Restore and Drive Indexing were then
disabled as well. The hard drive was de-fragmented and
a 768MB permanent page file was created. Lastly, we set
Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance", installed
the benchmarking software and ran all of the tests. The
benchmarking was done with ATi's and NVIDIA's drivers
configured for maximum visual quality. ATi's "Quality"
anti-aliasing and Anisotropic filtering methods were
employed throughout our testing, while the Performance
slider available on NVIDIA's "Performance and Quality"
driver tab was set to "Quality". For the "4X AA +
Aniso" tests listed in our graphs, we enabled 4X
anti-aliasing and 8X Anisotropic filtering in both NVIDIA's
and ATi's driver panels. All results were compared to
an ATi All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro and a NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700
Ultra for reference.
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HotHardware's Test Setup |
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Intel
Powered - 2.4GHz System |
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Hardware:
Processor -
Mainboard -
Video Cards -
Memory -
Audio -
Hard Drive -
Optical Drive -
Other -
Software:
Operating System -
Chipset Drivers -
DirectX -
Video Drivers - |
Intel Pentium 4
2.4GHz
Albatron PX875 Pro
i875P "Canterwood" Chipset
Gigabyte Radeon 9800 XT
500/600
ATI All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra
512MB Kingston HyperX PC3500
CAS 2
Integrated SoundMax Audio
Western Digital 30GB - 7200RPM - IDE
Creative 52X CD-ROM
3.5" Floppy Drive
Windows XP Professional SP1
Intel INF v5.1.1.1002
DirectX 9.0b
ATI Catalyst v4.1
NVIDIA Forceware v53.03 |
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Performance Comparisons
With AquaMark3 |
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DX8
and DX9 Shader Ops |
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Aquamark
3 |
Aquamark 3 comes to us by way of
Massive Development.
Massive's release of the original Aquanox in 1999 wasn't
well received, but it was one of the first games to
implement DX8 shaders, which led to the creation of
Aquamark 2 - a benchmark that was used by many analysts.
Since the Aquamark benchmarks are based on an actual
game engine, they must support old and new video cards
alike. Thus, Aquamark 3 utilizes not only DirectX
9 shaders, but DirectX 8 and DirectX 7 as well. We
ran this benchmark at resolutions of 1024x768 and
1600x1200 with no anti-aliasing, then again with 4x and
6x AA. Throughout all of these tests, 4X
Anisotropic filtering was enabled from within Aquamark
3's control panel, which is the default setting for this
benchmark. |
When testing all
three cards, the Gigabyte GV-R96X128D maintained the top
seed throughout each test. Even the AIW 9600 Pro put
up a good showing against the 5700 ultra, most notably at 4X
and 6X AA settings. As the resolution increased,
AquaMark 3 proved to be a tough challenge for all three
cards, lowering all three to single digit scores with 6X AA
enabled.
Halo & Unreal Tournament 2003 |