Asus AX800 XT (Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition)

Our Test System & Final Fantasy XI

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested the Asus AX800 XT 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.

The HotHardware Test System
Intel Powered Screamer
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 XT
GeForce 6800 GT
GeForce 6800 Ultra
GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition

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 9.0c

ATI Catalyst v4.8 (4.9 for Doom 3)
NVIDIA Forceware v61.77
Performances Comparisons With Final Fantasy XI Benchmark 2 v1.01
A Classic Console Franchise On The PC

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 XT finished the Final Fantasy XI benchmark well ahead of all of the NVIDIA powered cards we tested. With its score of 6334, the AX800 XT finished the test 401 frames ahead of the GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme edition (6.75% faster) and 410 frames ahead of the standard 6800 Ultra (6.92% faster).  This is definitely not one of the more taxing benchmarks in our suite though, so lets move onto something a little more intensive...


Tags:  Asus, ATI, Radeon, edition, XT, platinum, PLA, X8

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