ASUS EAX1900XTX - Radeon X1900XTX From Asus
Our Test System and 3DMark06
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEMS: We tested the NVIDIA based cards on an Asus A8N32-SLI nForce 4 SLIX16 chipset based motherboard. The ATI powered cards, however, were tested on an A8R32-MVP motherboard based on the CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset. Both systems used the same AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 dual-core processor and 2GB of low-latency Corsair XMS RAM, though. The first thing we did when configuring these test systems was enter each BIOS and loaded their "High Performance Defaults." The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with SP2 was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed the latest chipset drivers available, installed all of the other drivers necessary for the rest of our components, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were also disabled, the hard drive was defragmented, and a 1024MB permanent page file was created on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of the benchmarking software, and ran the tests.
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Motherboard - Video Cards - Memory - Audio - Hard Drive -
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Hardware Used: AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 (2.6GHz x 2) Asus A8N32-SLI nForce4 SLIX16 chipset Asus A8R32-MVP ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 GeForce 7950 GX2 GeForce 7900 GTX XFX GeForce 7950 GX2 Radeon X1900 XTX ASUS Radeon X1900 XTX 2048MB Corsair XMS PC3200 RAM CAS 2 Integrated on board Western Digital "Raptor" 36GB - 10,000RPM - SATA |
OS - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - Synthetic (DX) - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - OpenGL - |
Relevant Software: Windows XP Professional SP2 nForce Drivers v6.85 DirectX 9.0c (March Redist) NVIDIA Forceware v91.29 ATI Catalyst v6.6 Benchmarks Used: 3DMark06 v1.0.2 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05 FarCry v1.33* F.E.A.R. v1.05 Half Life 2* Quake 4 v1.2* * - Custom Test (HH Exclusive demo) |
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;) 3DMark06 |
Futuremark recently launched a brand-new version of their popular benchmark, 3DMark06. The new version of the benchmark is updated in a number of ways, and now includes not only Shader Model 2.0 tests, but Shader Model 3.0 and HDR tests as well. Some of the assets from 3DMark05 have been re-used, but the scenes are now rendered with much more geometric detail and the shader complexity is vastly increased as well. Max shader length in 3DMark05 was 96 instructions, while 3DMark06 ups the number of instructions to 512. 3DMark06 also employs much more lighting, and there is extensive use of soft shadows. With 3DMark06, Futuremark has also updated how the final score is tabulated. In this latest version of the benchmark, SM 2.0 and HDR / SM3.0 tests are weighted and the CPU score is factored into the final tally as well. |
Given the fact that the ASUS EAX1900XTX is using the same PCB design and operating frequencies as the Radeon X1900XTX reference card we previously reviewed, it is no surprise to see that the scores between the two are extremely close. Here, the ASUS card breaks the 6,000 point barrier and just sneaks past the NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX in terms of overall score. Regardless, the dual-GPU GeForce 7950 GX2 manages to outpace the other cards by a significant margin with a healthy lead of nearly 2,000 points.
Specifically looking at Shader 2.0 performance, we again see that both ATI-based cards return nearly identical performance. Here, the GeForce 7900 GTX offers slightly better performance with the dual-GPU GeForce 7950 GX2 again trumping the competition.
Turning our attention towards Shader Model 3.0, we find a slightly different outcome. In this case, the ATI X1900 XTX GPU's are able to best the GeForce 7900 GTX by a fair margin. However, these single GPU-based cards again find themselves trailing the dual-GPU equipped GeForce 7950 GX2.
