Asus EAX1600PRO and EN7600GT - HDMI On Tap
Testing System and 3DMark06
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested the Asus EN7600GT and EAX1600PRO on the Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI powered by an Intel Pentium 4 550 processor and 1GB of Corsair XMS2 DDR2 memory. 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 1536 MB permanent page file was created on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows' Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of the benchmarking software, and ran our tests.
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Motherboard - Video Cards - Memory - Audio - Hard Drive -
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Hardware Used: Intel Pentium 4 550 (3.4GHz) Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI Quad Royal nForce4 SLI X16 HIS Radeon X1650 XT iSilence II Asus EN7600GT Asus EAX1600Pro 1GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 Integrated 2x Western Digital SE16 (RAID 0) 7,200RPM - SATA II - 250GB |
Operating System - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - Synthetic (DX) - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - OpenGL - OpenGL - |
Relevant Software: Windows XP Professional SP2 nForce Drivers v6.86 DirectX 9.0c NVIDIA Forceware v93.71 ATI Catalyst 7.1 Benchmarks Used: 3DMark06 v1.1.0 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05 F.E.A.R. v1.0.8 Half Life 2 - Lost Coast Need for Speed: Carbon Quake4 v1.2 Prey |
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;) 3DMark06 |
Futuremark recently launched a brand new version of its popular benchmark, 3DMark06. The new version of the benchmark is updated in a number of ways and now includes not only Shader Model 2.0 tests but also Shader Model 3.0 and HDR tests as well. Some of the assets from 3DMark05 have been re-used, but the scenes are now rendered with much more geometric detail, and the shader complexity is vastly increased as well. Max shader length in 3DMark05 was 96 instructions, while 3DMark06 ups the number of instructions to 512. 3DMark06 also employs much more lighting, and there is extensive use of soft shadows. With 3DMark06, Futuremark has also updated how the final score is tabulated. In this latest version of the benchmark, SM 2.0 and HDR / SM3.0 tests are weighted, and the CPU score is factored into the final tally as well. |
Based solely on these benchmarks, it would appear that the EN7600GT and EAX1600PRO are operating on two different levels. The X1650 XT that we reviewed earlier makes a much better competitor for the EN7600GT, with the two card flip-flopping in the separate tests; the 7600 GT performing better with SM2.0 tests and the X1650 XT at SM3.0, and nipping the 7600 GT overall. The EAX1600 Pro, on the other hand, is only putting out half of what the other two can produce.
