BFG's GeForce FX 5900XT OC

HotHardware's Testing Setup Where it all begins

We tested these cards on an i865PE "Springdale" based Asus P4P800 Deluxe motherboard, powered by an Intel Pentium 4 2.4CGHz CPU (800MHz System Bus).  The first thing we did when configuring this test system was enter the BIOS and load the "High Performance Defaults".  Then we set the memory to operate at 200MHz (Dual DDR400) with the CAS Latency and other memory timings set by SPD and the AGP aperture size set to 256MB. The hard drive was formatted and Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 was installed.  After the installation completed, we installed the latest Intel chipset drivers and then hit the Windows Update site to download and install all of the available updates. Next, 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 also 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.

Performance Comparisons With Aquamark 3 DX8 and DX9 Shaders

Aquamark 3

Aquamark 3 comes to us by way of Massive Development. Massive's release of the original Aquanox in 1999 wasn't very well received by the gaming community, but it was one of the first games to implement DX8 class shaders, which led to the creation of Aquamark 2 - a benchmark previously used by many analysts. Since the Aquamark benchmarks are based on an actual game engine, they must support old and new video cards alike. Thus, the latest version of Aquamark, Aquamark 3, utilizes not only DirectX 9 class shaders, but DirectX 8 and DirectX 7 as well. We ran this benchmark at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1600x1200 with no anti-aliasing, and again with 4x AA.

As we have already tested the Pixelview 5900XT model just a week prior, we will pretty much know what to expect with the majority of these benchmarks. By the same token, it would be safe to say that we will generally expect that BFG's version of the 5900XT that comes pre-overclocked to 430MHz/735MHz will outperform the standard model by some degree. So, without further ado, our first benchmark, AquaMark 3 gave us predictable results. The two 5900XT models are at the fore-front, with the 9600XT and 5700 Ultra trailing behind. In all instances, BFG's card came out about 7-8% higher than the stock e-VGA model, which falls in line directly with the 7.5% increase in speed.

Benchmarks With Halo Halo - All Patched & Ready To Go! Halo For many gamers, the release of Halo marked the end of a long wait, since it was originally released as an Xbox exclusive a few years back. No additional patches or tweaks are needed to benchmark with Halo, as Gearbox has included all of the necessary information in their README file. The Halo benchmark runs through four of the cut-scenes from the game, after which the average frame rate is recorded. We patched the game using the latest v1.031 patch and ran this benchmark twice, once at 1024x768 and then again at 1280x1024. Anti-aliasing doesn't work properly with Halo at the moment, so all of the test below were run with anti-aliasing disabled.

Our look at Halo offered up pretty much the same results; 5900XT models at the top, the other two cards battling it out for third place. ATi has actually made some strides with the new Catalyst 4.6 drivers, increasing performance slightly than what we've seen in the past, and enabling it to take a 9-10% lead over the 5700 Ultra. In the battle for the top spot, we've got the BFG 5900XT OC over the e-VGA 5900XT by 3 frames at 1024x768 and just over a frame at 1600x1200. The percentage difference was right on at 7.5% for the first benchmark, but slipped slightly to only over 3% at the higher resolution.