BFG GeForce 6800 GT Overclocked
Our Test System & Final Fantasy XI
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested the BFG GeForce 6800 GT OC on an i875P based DFI LANPARTY Pro 875 motherboard, powered by an Intel Pentium 4 3.2CGHz CPU. The first thing we did when configuring this test system was enter the BIOS and load the "High Performance Defaults" setting. Then we set the memory to operate at 200MHz in dual-channel mode, with the CAS Latency and other memory timings set by the SPD, and the AGP aperture size was raised 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. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers for the rest of our components and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating, System Restore and Drive Indexing 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 the benchmarking software and ran all of the tests.
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 Final Fantasy XI |
The Final Fantasy franchise is well known to console gamers, but Squaresoft has since made the jump to the PC with a MMORPG version of this classic. The Final Fantasy XI benchmark runs through multiple scenes from the game and displays a final score every time a full cycle of the demo is completed. Although the demo is meant the check an entire system's readiness to play the game, the number of frames rendered scales when different video cards are used. Lower scores indicate some frames were dropped to complete the demo in the allotted time. The scores below were taken with the demo set to its "High Resolution" option (1024x768), with anti-aliasing disabled. |
Starting off with the Final Fantasy Benchmark, we've got the next-generation cards from both ATi and NVIDIA performing at close to identical levels. While the "older" GFFX 5950 Ultra fell sharply off of the pace, the equally dated Radeon 9800XT still managed to put up good numbers, eclipsing the newer GeForce 6800 standard model. However, the GT model, with its 4 additional pipelines and increased GPU and memory speeds went beyond the 9800XT, with BFG's overclocked model gaining an additional 29 points over the non-overclocked card. In this benchmark, even with slightly less memory bandwidth, the Asus Radeon X800 Pro took the top spot, outperforming the BFG GF 6800 GT by about 1.5%.
