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The Hothardware Test System & Testing
Methodology |
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AthlonXP + nForce2 |
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COMMON HARDWARE:
Athlon XP 2000+
Asus A7N8X Deluxe (AGP 8X)
512MB Geil PC3200 (CAS 2.5)
On-Board NIC
On-Board Sound
Western Digital 7200RPM 30GB HD
Creative 52X CD-ROM
Standard Floppy Drive
Windows XP Professional SP1 (DirectX 8.1)
nForce Chipset Drivers v2.03
NVIDIA Detonators v41.09 Drivers
VIDEO CARDS TESTED:
MSI VT2D8X GeForce4 Ti4600
(128MB) 300/650
eVGA GeForce4 Ti4600 (128MB) 300/650
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Methodology:
We have seen significant variations in benchmark
scores from one site to the next. Therefore, we
feel it is necessary to explain how we configure each
test system, before running any benchmarks. We chose
to test these video boards on the
Asus A7N8X Deluxe (AGP 8X),
with an
Athlon XP 2000+.
The first thing we did when configuring this system
was enter the BIOS and "Load Optimized Defaults".
We then configured the Memory CAS Latency and other
memory timings to be set by the SPD. The hard drive
was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional w/ SP1
was installed. After the Windows installation was
complete, we installed the nForce chipset drivers and
then hit the Windows Update site. We downloaded
all of the available updates, with the exception of
the ones related to Windows Messenger. Then we
installed all of the necessary drivers for the rest of
our components, disabling and removing Windows
Messenger. Auto-Updating and System Restore were
also disabled, and we set up a 768MB permanent page
file. Lastly, we set Windows XPs Visual Effects
to "best performance", installed all of the
benchmarking software, defragged the hard drive and
ran all of the tests at the CPU's default clock speed. |
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DirectX 8 Benchmarks with 3DMark 2001SE (Build
330) |
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MadOnion's Flagship |
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One of the most popular DirectX 8 benchmarks available has
to be FutureMark's 3DMark2001SE. With FutureMark's
new 3DMark2003 recently release, we suspect that
3DMark2001SE's days are numbered, but only time will tell.
Nonetheless, it's still an excellent tool to assess a
video card's DirectX 8 graphics capabilities, so let's get
rolling..
At the default
1024x768 resolution, the performance of the two cards was
extremely close. Even when we overclocked the card
the score barely increased 60 points. Clearly we are
seeing the effects of the test being CPU limited.
At the next
two resolutions, we continued to see a slight difference
between the 4X and 8X AGP cards. However, the
overclocking scores became more significant. In the
first test the overclocked score barely increase .5%, yet
at 1280x1024 we saw a 3% gain and at 1600x1200 a 6% gain.
Next we'll
give the cards a run at UT2003...
On to
UT2003 and Quake 3 |