ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 Preview
The Test System & 3DMark05
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested the Mobility Radeon X1600 using an Asus notebook, powered by an Intel Pentium M 2.0GHz processor and 1GB of DDR2 RAM. We did not have the opportunity to re-format the notebook's hard drive and install Windows XP ourselves, but we did streamline the system a bit to maximize performance. We disabled Auto-Updating and System Restore, and a created 2048MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. We also ran a Disk Cleanup, deleted all temporary files, and disabled every unnecessary application from loading on start-up. Lastly, we set Windows XP's 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 - |
Hardware Used: 2.0GHz Pentium M Asus A7G Notebook Intel i915PM chipset ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 1024MB DDR2 RAM Dual-Channel RealTek HD on-board Fujitsu 100GB 7200RPM - SATA |
Operating System - DirectX - Video Drivers - Synthetic (DX) - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - OpenGL - |
Relevant Software: Windows XP Professional SP2 DirectX 9.0c ATI Catalyst v8.183.4 Benchmarks Used: 3DMark05 v1.2.0 FarCry v1.33* F.E.A.R. Half Life 2* Quake 4* * - Custom Test (HH Exclusive demo) |
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;) 3DMark05 |
3DMark05 is the latest installment in a long line of synthetic 3D graphics benchmarks, dating back to late 1998. 3DMark05 is a synthetic benchmark that requires a DirectX 9.0 compliant video card, with support for Shader Model 2.0 or higher, to render all of the various modules that comprise the suite. To generate its final "score", 3DMark05 runs three different simulated game tests and uses each test's framerate in the final tabulation. Fillrate, Memory bandwidth, and compute performance especially have a measurable impact on performance in this benchmark. We ran 3DMark05's default test (1,024 x 768) on the Mobility Radeon X1600, with and without anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, and have the overall results posted for you below. |
Unfortunately, we did not have a similarly configured reference notebook to use for comparison purposes, so we'll only be presenting the Mobility Radeon X1600's performance for you here. Please note that the notebook we used for testing had a maximum display resolution of 1400x900. Because of this ceiling, and the fact that the games we used for testing did not natively support this resolution, we were only able to test the Mobility Radeon X1600 at supported resolutions, lower than 1400x900. This meant testing at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1152x864 with most games. Although with FarCry we had to go down to 800x600 as well, because a resolution of 1152x864 was not available.
As you can see, the Mobility Radeon X1600 finished just shy of 4000 in 3DMark05's default test when no anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering was used. Enabling AA and aniso obviously had an impact on performance, lowering the Mobility Radeon X1600's overall score by 1271 points, or approximately 33%.
