Abit Fatal1ty Radeon X800 XL
Our Test System & 3DMark05
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We put together two different test systems for this article. We tested our NVIDIA based cards on a Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI nForce 4 SLI chipset based motherboard, powered by an AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 processor and 1GB of low-latency Corsair XMS RAM. However, the ATI based cards were tested on an ATI reference Radeon Xpress 200 motherboard, but with the same processor and RAM. The first thing we did when configuring these test systems was enter each BIOS and load 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 chipset drivers available, 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 also 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-55 (2.6GHz) Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI nForce4 SLI chipset ATI Reference CrossFire MB ATI Radeon Xpress 200 CF Edition Abit Fatal1ty X800 XL (512MB) ATI Radeon X1800 XL ATI Radeon X850XT GeForce 7800 GT 1024MB Corsair XMS PC3200 RAM CAS 2 Integrated on board Western Digital "Raptor" 36GB - 10,000RPM - SATA |
Operating System - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - Synthetic (DX) - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - OpenGL - OpenGL - |
Relevant Software: Windows XP Professional SP2 (Patched) nForce Drivers v6.82 DirectX 9.0c NVIDIA Forceware v81.82 ATI Catalyst v5.10 beta Benchmarks Used: 3DMark05 v1.2.0 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.04 FarCry v1.33* Half Life 2* Doom 3 v1.3 (Single & Multi-Player)* Chronicles of Riddick v1.1* * - Custom Test (HH Exclusive demo) |
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;) 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. |
We'll be including two sets of numbers for the Abit Fatal1ty X800 XL 512MB throughout the performance segment of this article; one set in normal mode (398MHz/986MHz) and another set in xTurbo mode (419MHz/1094MHz). As you can see, switching into the higher-clocked xTurbo mode has a measurable impact on performance in 3DMark05. At its "default" clocks, the Fatal1ty X800 XL 512MB just missed the 5K mark, but when in xTurbo mode the card jumped 349 points, or roughly 7%. Unfortunately though, even with the higher clock speeds, the Fatal1ty X800 XL 512MB wasn't able to catch any of its similarly priced competition.
