ATI Radeon X1K Refresh: X1950 XTX, X1900 XT 256MB, X1650 Pro, and X1300 XT
Test Systems and X1300 / X1650 3DMark06
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEMS: We tested the NVIDIA based cards used in this article on an Asus A8N32-SLI nForce 4 SLIX16 chipset based motherboard. The ATI powered cards, however, were tested on an A8R32-MVP motherboard based on the CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset. Both systems used the same AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 dual-core processor and 2GB of low-latency Corsair XMS RAM. The first thing we did when configuring these test systems was enter each BIOS and loaded their "High Performance Defaults." The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with SP2 was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed the latest chipset drivers available, installed all of the other drivers necessary for the rest of our components, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were also disabled, the hard drive was defragmented, and a 1024MB 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 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: AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 (2.6GHz x 2) Asus A8N32-SLI nForce4 SLIX16 chipset Asus A8R32-MVP ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 GeForce 7950 GX2 (x2) GeForce 7900 GTX (x2) GeForce 7900 GT GeForce 7600 GT Radeon X1950 XTX (x2) Radeon X1900 XTX (x2) Radeon X1900 XT 256MB Radeon X1650 Pro Radeon X1300 XT Radeon X1800 GTO 2048MB Corsair XMS PC3200 RAM CAS 2 Integrated on board Western Digital "Raptor" 74GB - 10,000RPM - SATA |
Operating System - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - Synthetic (DX) - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - OpenGL - |
Relevant Software: Windows XP Professional SP2 nForce Drivers v6.86 DirectX 9.0c (August Redist.) NVIDIA Forceware v91.45 ATI Catalyst v6.8 Benchmarks Used: 3DMark06 v1.0.2 FarCry v1.33* F.E.A.R. v1.07 Half Life 2: Episode 1* Prey* * - Custom Test (HH Exclusive demo) |
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;) 3DMark06 |
Futuremark recently launched a brand-new version of their 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 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. |
Considering the facts that the Sapphire Radeon X1300 XT and Radeon X1650 Pro cards share the same PCB and memory compliment, and that a scant 25MHz core clock frequency is the only major difference between them that would affect performance, we were expecting the two cards to put up similar scores in all of 3DMark06's tests, and we were right. Only a few percentage points separated the two cards here in every test thanks to the Sapphire Radeon X1300 XT's higher clocks. Unfortunately, we could not reliably down-clock the card to reference levels to guage "stock" performance. Please keep that in mind, as a reference X1300 XT card will most definitely perform below Sapphire's offering.
