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HOW WE
CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM:
We tested the
Sapphire "Ultimate Edition" Radeon 9800 & 9600 Pros on an
i875P "Canterwood" based MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R motherboard,
powered by a Pentium 4 3.0CGHz CPU (800MHz Bus). The
first thing we did when configuring this test system was
enter the BIOS and loaded "High Performance Defaults".
Then we set the memory to operate at 200MHz (in Dual DDR400
mode), with the CAS Latency and other memory timings set by
SPD. The AGP aperture size was then set to 256MB.
The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP
Professional with SP1 was installed. When the Windows
installation was complete, we installed the Intel chipset
drivers and then hit the Windows Update site to download and
install 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 and Windows Messenger was disabled and removed
the system. Then Auto-Updating and System Restore were
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 the tests at our
CPU's default clock speed. All of the tests were run
with ATi's drivers configured for maximum visual
quality. ATi's "Quality" Antialiasing and
Anisotropic filtering methods were employed throughout our
testing. For the "4X AA + Aniso" tests
listed in our graphs, we enabled 4X AA and 8X
Anisotropic filtering in ATi's driver panels.
Now it's time for the results...
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HotHardware's Test Setup |
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Intel
Inside! |
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Common
Hardware:
Intel Pentium 4
Processor 3.0GHz / 800MHz System Bus
MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R
512MB (256MB x2) Corsair XMS3200C2
Seagate Barracuda V 7200 RPM SATA 120GB Hard Drive
Common
Software:
Windows XP with SP1
DirectX 9.0a
Intel Chipset Software v5.00.1012
Intel Application Accelerator RAID Edition v3.0
Video Cards
Tested:
Sapphire Atlantis Ultimate Edition Radeon 9800 Pro (128MB)
Sapphire Atlantis Ultimate Edition Radeon 9600 Pro (128MB)
Gigabyte GV-R98P128D Radeon 9800 Pro (128MB)
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro (128MB)
Video Drivers
Used:
ATI
Catalyst Drivers v3.6 - WHQL Certified
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Performance Comparisons
With
Gun
Metal |
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DirectX 9 Gaming |
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We decided not
to use any synthetic benchmarks in this review. Every
benchmark represented here was based on an actual game
engine. We used the relatively new Gun Metal DirectX 9
benchmark, developed by Yeti Studios, in our first set of
tests. Vertex Shader 2.0 and Pixel Shader 1.1
operations are used in the creation of Gun Metal's game
world. This test is very GPU limited, and because Yeti's
intent was to stress all modern 3D accelerators, 2X
Antialiasing and Anisotropic filtering are enabled by
default and cannot be disabled.
For the remainder of this
review, we'll be comparing the performance of the Sapphire
Ultimate Edition Radeon 9800 and 9600 Pros to a Gigabyte
Radeon 9800 Pro and an ATi Radeon 9600 Pro. With the
first two benchmarks, we've also included some numbers from
a 128MB GeForce FX 5900. As you can
see in the charts above, the passively cooled Sapphire cards
performed at essentially the exact same levels as their ATi
based competition.
The Sapphire Ultimate Edition Radeon 9800 Pro was a fraction
of a frame per second slower than the Gigabyte card, but the
Ultimate Edition Radeon 9600 Pro came in slightly ahead of
the ATi built card. The differences are so small that
they fall well within the margin of error in this test,
though. The FX 5900, however, smoked all of the ATi
based cards in this benchmark.
More With DirectX
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