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By:
Jeff Bouton
October 6th, 2003
General
Impressions:
Once we had the
All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro installed, we were eager to start
playing with all of its functions. In general,
everything worked as expected, although there were a few
items that we thought we should mention. For one, due
to limitation with the hardware, TV output cannot be dragged
from one monitor to the next. When the TV component is
loaded, it will default to the primary monitor and will not
move to the next screen. While this may be necessary
from a design stand point, this was disappointing since we
think a lot of users will plan on watching TV on the
secondary monitor while working on the other. We had
similar behavior with Flight Simulator 2004, a game known
for its dual monitor capability. No matter what we
did, the screens would not span. While it seems that
ATi has offered an answer to the dual monitor dilemma, they
still need to make some improvements before it can provide
dual monitor gaming.
Another odd
anomaly we encountered was with our Microsoft Explorer
Optical Mouse. We found that once we used the wheel of
the mouse to scroll in any application, a faint buzzing
could be heard at higher volumes whether we were scrolling,
moving a program around the screen or simply moving our
mouse around the screen. This was a new issue that did
not occur with a Radeon 9800 Pro installed, and only
happened only after the wheel was used. For now we
lean toward the culprit being a driver issue with the
All-In-Wonder or perhaps a conflict between it and our sound
card. We'll keep an eye on this and attempt to find a
resolution and will be sure to revisit this review with any
updates.
Aside from that,
the All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro installed in less than 10 minutes
and we were up and running. The processes is a little
longer due to the additional hardware that gets installed,
but once complete and we answered a few questions when
launching the Multimedia Center for the first time, each
component appeared to work as expected.
Now let's get
started with some benchmarking!
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HotHardware's Test Setup |
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The
Power To Soar! |
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Common
Hardware:
Intel Pentium 4
Processor 3.0GHz / 800MHz System Bus
MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R
1GB Kingston HyperX PC3500
Seagate Barracuda V 7200 RPM SATA 120GB Hard Drive
Common
Software:
Windows XP with SP1
DirectX 9.0b
Intel Chipset Software v5.00.1012
Intel Application Accelerator RAID Edition v3.0
Video Cards
Tested:
ATi All-In-Wonder Radeon 9600 Pro (128)
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro (128MB)
GeForce FX 5600 (256MB)
Video Drivers
Used:
ATI
Catalyst Drivers v3.7 - WHQL Certified
NVIDIA Detonator FX Drivers v51.75
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HOW WE
CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM:
We tested the
ATi All-In-Wonder Radeon 9600 Pro on an i875P "Canterwood" based MSI 875P
Neo-FIS2R motherboard, powered by a Pentium 4 3.0CGHz CPU
(800MHz Bus). The first thing we did when configuring this
test system was enter the BIOS and loaded the "High Performance
Defaults". Next we set the memory to operate at 200MHz
(Dual DDR400), with the CAS Latency and other memory timings
set by SPD. The AGP aperture size was then set to 256MB.
The hard drive was 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, with the exception of
the ones related to Windows Messenger. Then we installed
all of the necessary drivers for the rest of our components
and Windows Messenger was disabled and removed from the
system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were
disabled, the hard drive was de-fragmented and a 768MB
permanent page file was created. Lastly, we set Windows
XP's Visual Effects to "best performance", installed all of
the benchmarking software and ran all of the tests. All of the benchmarking was done
with ATi's and NVIDIA's drivers configured for maximum
visual quality. ATi's "Quality" Anti Aliasing and
Anisotropic filtering methods were employed throughout our
testing, while the Performance slider available on NVIDIA's
"Performance and Quality" driver tab was set to "Quality".
For the "4X AA + Aniso" tests listed in our
graphs, we enabled 4X AA and 8X Anisotropic
filtering in both NVIDIA's and ATi's driver panels.
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Performance Comparisons
With
Gun
Metal |
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DirectX 9.0 Gaming |
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One of the first and most
effective DirectX 9 benchmarks to arrive on the scene is Gun
Metal from Yeti Studios. The goal of Yeti Studios was to
develop a test that stresses a video card's DirectX 9
capabilities effectively so its true performance is reflected.
The idea is to stress test the card to
its fullest to give us an idea of what DX9 performance it is
capable of. With this test we ran the Benchmark 1 at
1024x768 and 1280x1024.
The two Radeon 9600 Pro cards
managed very close scores with the All-In-Wonder taking a
minor lead. This slight edge may be a result of the
additional memory clockspeed, however, it's not something to
get excited about. The nVidia GeForce FX5600 managed a
solid third place at both resolutions, dropping an average
of 4-5 points, needing close to a 50% increase in
performance to catch up. Next we'll give Splinter Cell
and Comanche4 a run.
Splinter
Cell and Comanche4
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