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How We
Configured Our Test System:
We tested the Stealth S80 on an i865PE "Springdale" based
Asus P4P800 Deluxe motherboard,
powered by an Intel Pentium 4 2.4CGHz CPU (800MHz System
Bus). 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 (Dual DDR400) with the CAS Latency and other memory timings set by SPD and the
AGP aperture size set to 256MB. The hard drive was
formatted and Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 was
installed. After the installation completed, we installed
the latest Intel chipset drivers and then hit the Windows Update
site to download and install all of the available updates. Next, we installed
all of the necessary drivers for the rest of our components
and Windows Messenger was disabled and removed from the
system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were also disabled,
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 all of the benchmarking
software and ran all of the tests. All of the benchmarking
was done with ATi's and NVIDIA's drivers configured for
maximum visual quality.
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HotHardware's Test Setup |
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Benchmarks
With Halo |
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Finally on the PC, Where it Belongs |
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Although the release of Halo marked the end of a long wait,
since it was originally released as an Xbox exclusive a
few years back, it hasn't fared too well on the PC. No additional patches or tweaks
are needed to use this game's built-in benchmarking
utility, however, as Gearbox has included
all of the information needed in their README file.
The benchmark runs through four of the cut scenes from
the game, after which the average frame rate is
displayed. We ran it twice, once at 1024x768 and again at
1280x1024.
Anti-aliasing doesn't
work properly with this game at the moment, so all of
the tests below were run with anti-aliasing disabled. |
Compared "mano-y-mano",
the low-end GeForce FX 5200 beats out the Radeon 9200SE
powered Stealth S80 quite handily. At either
resolution, we saw the 5200 nearly double the output of the
Stealth S80, although neither card could really be deemed
"game-worthy" with such low frame rates.
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Performances Comparisons
With Final Fantasy XI v2.0 |
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Chocobos finally make it to the big screen |
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Final Fantasy is a title that is more well known by
console gamers, but it appears that Squaresoft has made
a successful jump to the PC, with a MMORPG version of the
classic. The demo version is equipped with a built-in
benchmark, which displays a score every
time it makes a full cycle.
Although the demo is meant the check an entire system's
readiness to play the game, the number of frames
rendered in the demo scales well with different video
cards installed. Lower scores indicated some frames
were dropped to complete the demo in the allotted time.
The scores below were taken with the demo set to "High
Resolution" (1024x768), with anti-aliasing disabled. |
It's the
5200 Ultra in the lead for a second time besting the Stealth
S80 by 1000 points, nearly a 50% improvement in the number
of frames rendered. Early indications are that the
9200SE's lower core speed and limited fillrate will seriously hamper running
games at anything above 800x600, and that's without enabling
anything like anti-aliasing or anisotropic
filtering.
Unreal Tournament 2003 & Splinter Cell
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