ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer

Test system specifications Building the beast

    Video Cards:

        Asus Extreme N6600GT Silencer
        XFX GeForce 6600 256MB DDR2
        HIS Radeon X700 Pro
        ATI Radeon X1300 Pro

    Additional Hardware:

        Athlon64 3000+ (Winchester)
        2x256MB Mushkin lvl2 PC3200
        2x512MB Mushkin Redline w/ F.E.A.R.
        Onboard Audio (7.1 AC97)
        120GB/160GB Western Digital Caviar ATA/100 HDs

Performance Comparisons with 3DMark05 v1.2.0 Starting out synthetic

3DMark05

3DMark05 is the latest installment in a long line of synthetic 3D graphics benchmarks, dating back to late 1998. 3DMark05 is a synthetic benchmark that requires a DirectX 9.0 compliant video card, with support for Pixel Shaders 2.0 or higher, to render all of the various modules that comprise the suite. To generate its final "score", 3DMark05 runs three different simulated game tests and uses each test's framerate in the final tabulation. Fillrate, Memory bandwidth, and compute performance especially all have a measurable impact on performance in this benchmark. We ran 3DMark05's default test (1,024 x 768) on all of the cards and configurations we tested, and have the overall results posted for you below.

Our first test might just set a precedent for the rest of our benchmarks. ASUS's Extreme N6600GT Silencer starts off with a solid lead over the competition here, besting every other card we tested. Though the 3DMark series of benchmarks are synthetic tests, a high score in 3DMark05 should equate to decent performance in most of today's Direct3D based games. There's only one way to find out though, so let's get to our actual in-game benchmarks...