Asus EN7900GT TOP - GeForce 7900 GT
Test System and 3DMark05 Scores
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested the ASUS EN7900GT TOP on a MSI P4N Diamond - an nForce 4 Intel Edition SLI chipset-based motherboard - powered by an Intel Pentium 4 550 processor and 1GB of low-latency 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 the tests.
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Motherboard - Video Cards - Memory - Audio - Hard Drive -
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Hardware Used: Intel Pentium 4 550 (3.4GHz) MSI P4N Diamond nForce4 SLI chipset Asus EN7900GT TOP NVIDIA 7800GT ATI Radeon X1800XL 1024MB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 Integrated Seagate Barracuda V 7,200RPM - SATA |
Operating System - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - Synthetic (DX) - Synthetic (DX) - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - OpenGL - |
Relevant Software: Windows XP Professional SP2 nForce Drivers v7.13 DirectX 9.0c NVIDIA Forceware v84.85 ATI Catalyst v6.5 Benchmarks Used: 3DMark05 v1.2.0 3DMark06 v1.0.2 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05 X3: Reunion DEMO F.E.A.R. v1.0.4 Quake4 v1.2* * - Custom Test (HH Exclusive demo) |
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;) 3DMark05 |
3DMark05 is the latest installment in a line of synthetic 3D graphics benchmarks from Futuremark Corp that date back to late 1998. The benchmark itself isn't based on a playable game engine, but it does boast fairly impressive DX9-driven visuals and lighting effects. It's also a versatile DirectX 9 benchmarking tool that we feel is relative in terms of presenting our readers a full performance profile for 3D graphics and host processors. It's not a metric that you can exclusively gauge real-world performance on but rather a complement to our entire suite of application-based testing. We ran 3DMark05's default test (1,024 x 768) on all of the cards and configurations we tested. |
Although 3DMark06 is out and available, it's still relatively new and there are quite a few readers that will be more accustomed to the older 3DMark05 scores. As such, we decided to run both metrics for a taste of the old and the new. In 3DMark05, the EN7900GT TOP found its way to the top of the charts, with the single card besting the X1800XL by nearly 500 points and the 7800GT by 800. Doubling up the GeForce cards resulted in some expected gains, although the increase from single cards to dual configurations was greater for the 7800GT tandem than it was for the 7900GTs.
