Gigabyte GV-RX18L256V-B Radeon X1800XL
Test Setup and 3DMark05 Comparisons
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested the Gigabyte GV-RX78T256V-B on an ASUS P5WD2 i955X chipset-based motherboard, powered by an Intel Pentium 4 550 processor and 1GB of low-latency Corsair XMS2 DDR2 memory. The first thing we did when configuring this test system was enter the BIOS and loaded the "High Performance Defaults." The hard drive was then formatted and Windows XP Professional with SP2 was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed the latest Intel chipset drivers, installed all of the other necessary drivers for the rest of our components, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were then disabled, the hard drive was defragmented, and a 1536 MB permanent page file was created on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows' 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: Intel Pentium 4 550 (3.4GHz) ASUS P5WD2 Premium Intel i955x chipset Gigabyte GV-RX18L256V-B Gigabyte GeForce 7800GT ATI Radeon X850XT PE 1024MB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 Integrated Seagate Barracuda V 7,200RPM - SATA |
Operating System - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - Synthetic (DX) - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - OpenGL - OpenGL - |
Relevant Software: Windows XP Professional SP2 Intel INF Drivers v7.22.1006 DirectX 9.0c NVIDIA Forceware v81.98 ATI Catalyst v5.13 Benchmarks Used: 3DMark05 v1.2.0 Halo v1.06 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.04 FarCry v1.33* Half Life 2* Doom 3 v1.3* Chronicles of Riddick v1.1* * - Custom Test (HH Exclusive demo) |
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;) 3DMark05 |
3DMark05 is the latest installment in a line of synthetic 3D graphics benchmarks from Futuremark Corp that date back to late 1998. The benchmark itself isn't based on a playable game engine, but it does boast fairly impressive DX9-driven visuals and lighting effects. It's also a versatile DirectX 9 benchmarking tool that we feel is relative in terms of presenting our readers a full performance profile for 3D graphics and host processors. It's not a metric that you can exclusively gauge real-world performance on but rather a complement to our entire suite of application-based testing. We ran 3DMark05's default test (1,024 x 768) on all of the cards and configurations we tested. |
Gigabyte GV-NX78T256V-B = GeForce 7800 GT
Gigabyte GV-RX18L256V-B = Radeon X1800 XL
The Gigabyte RX18L256V-B gets off to a fast start, as it eclipsed the performance of the 7800GT based NX78T256V-B, by about 5%. It seems that with the latest Catalyst drivers, performance has been vastly improved over older versions. We had originally seen minimal differences between the two cards in past reviews. The X1800XL also picks off the previous flagship from ATi, the X850XT, outgunning it by over 10% in 3DMark05.
