Asus AX800 Pro (Radeon X800 Pro)
Test System & Final Fantasy XI
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested the Asus AX800 Pro/TD on an i875P based DFI LANPARTY Pro875B motherboard, powered by an Intel Pentium 4 3.2CGHz CPU. The first thing we did when configuring this test system was enter the BIOS and loaded the "High Performance Defaults". Then we set the memory to operate at 200MHz in dual-channel mode, with the CAS Latency and other memory timings set by the SPD, and then we set the AGP aperture size to 256MB. The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with SP1 was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed the Intel chipset drivers and hit the Windows Update site to download and install all of the available updates. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers for the rest of our components and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating, System Restore and Drive Indexing were then disabled, the hard drive was de-fragmented 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 the benchmarking software and ran all of the tests. (Note: 16X Anistropic filtering is not available on the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, hence the "WNR"s in our graphs.)
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| Hardware: Processor - Motherboard - Video Cards - Memory - Audio - Hard Drive - Optical Drive - Other - Software: Operating System - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - |
Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz DFI LANPARTY Pro875B i875P "Canterwood" Chipset Asus Radeon AX800 Pro ATi Radeon 9800 XT BFG GeForce 6800 GT OC GeForce 6800 GT GeForce 6800 (128MB) GeForce FX 5950 Ultra 1024MB Kingston HyperX PC3500 CAS 2 Integrated SoundMax Audio Western Digital "Raptor" 36GB - 10,000RPM - SATA Lite-On 16X DVD-ROM 3.5" Floppy Drive Windows XP Professional SP1 (Fully Patched) Intel INF v6.0.1.1002 DirectX 9.0b ATI Catalyst v4.6 NVIDIA Forceware v61.45 |
Throughout this review, we'll be comparing the Asus AX800 Pro/TD's performance to 5 other high-end video cards, including the 12-Pipe GeForce 6800 and the first retail GeForce 6800 GT to arrive in our lab, the BFG GeForce 6800 GT OC. We used the latest drivers available for all cards, the ATi Catalyst v4.6s and the latest Forceware drivers given to us by NVIDIA, v61.45. This should give us a very accurate and up-to-date look at how these cards perform today, on a relatively fast system...
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 Final Fantasy XI |
The Final Fantasy franchise is well known to console gamers, but Squaresoft has since made the jump to the PC with a MMORPG version of this classic. The Final Fantasy XI benchmark runs through multiple scenes from the game and displays a final score every time a full cycle of the demo is completed. Although the demo is meant the check an entire system's readiness to play the game, the number of frames rendered scales when different video cards are used. Lower scores indicate some frames were dropped to complete the demo in the allotted time. The scores below were taken with the demo set to its "High Resolution" option (1024x768), with anti-aliasing disabled. |
The Asus AX800 Pro/TD posted the highest score in the Final Fantasy benchmark, followed by the two GeForce 6800 GTs and the Radeon 9800 XT. With less than 100 frames separating the AX800 Pro from the GTs though, roughly a 1.6% difference, we can't really say one card is noticably faster than another. All of the video cards tested here had no problem tearing though this benchmark.
