BFG GeForce 7800 GTX OC
Our Test System & 3DMark05
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested our BFG GeForce 7800 GTX OC card on an Asus A8N SLI Premium nForce 4 SLI chipset based motherboard, powered by an AMD Athlon 64 FX57 processor and 1GB of low-latency Corsair XMS RAM. The first thing we did when configuring this test system was enter the BIOS and loaded the "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 nForce 4 chipset drivers, installed all of the other necessary drivers for the rest of our components, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were then disabled, the hard drive was defragmented, and a 768MB 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-57 (2.8GHz) Asus A8N SLI Premium nForce4 SLI chipset BFG GeForce 7800 GTX OC) NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra ATI Radeon X850XT PE 1024MB Corsair XMS PC3200 RAM CAS 2 Integrated on board (ALC850) Western Digital "Raptor" 36GB - 10,000RPM - SATA |
Operating System - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - Synthetic (DX) - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - OpenGL - DirectX - |
Relevant Software: Windows XP Professional SP2 (Patched) nForce Drivers v7.13 DirectX 9.0c NVIDIA Forceware v77.76 ATI Catalyst v5.7 Benchmarks Used: 3DMark05 v1.2.0 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.03 FarCry v1.31* Half Life 2* Doom 3 v1.3 (Single & Multi-Player)* Battlefield 2* * - Custom Test (HH Exclusive demo) |
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;) 3DMark05 |
3DMark05 is the latest installment in a line of synthetic 3D graphics benchmarks, dating back to late 1998. 3DMark99 came out in October 1998 and was followed by the DirectX 7 benchmark; 3DMark2000, which was released roughly two years later. The DirectX 8.1-compliant 3DMark2001 was released shortly thereafter and became a very popular tool used by many hardcore gamers. The legacy lived on with 3DMark 03, even through turbulent times and discrediting the usefulness of this synthetic benchmark. With 3DMark05, though, Futuremark is regaining audience and appeal as a relative performance metric that we also consider meaningful as only a part of the overall performance profile of a given product. |
3DMark's "default" test runs at a resolution of 1024X768 without Anti-Aliasing enabled. It consists of a combination of tests that focus on both graphics processing throughput and main system throughput. With our test systems identically configured, the scores here are comparable with the only variable being the graphics card and driver set installed. Referencing our system specs above, you'll note the two NVIDIA GPU based cards are running the same 77.76 latest version Forceware driver and the ATi X850 XT PE is running with the most recent Catalyst 5.7 release. The BFG GeForce 7800GTX OC shows 46% advantage over its predecessor, the GeForce 6800 Ultra and very close to a 28% gain over ATi's fastest available enthusiast card, the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition.
