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Our benchmarking
continued with some tests courtesy of Croteam's Serious Sam:
The Second Encounter. We configured the game to use
OpenGL (this is one of the few games that can use either
DirectX or OpenGL) and ran a series of tests using the
built-in "Little Trouble" demo. To make certain
the playing field was level, we used the "Extreme Quality"
script, created by the folks at Beyond3D, to max out the
texture and filtering quality with all of the cards tested.
 |
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Head-to-Head / Performance
With Serious Sam: TSE |
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Big
Guns + Exploding Aliens = Fun |
|
At 1024x768 the
Leadtek A300 Ultra TD puts up a good show, pulling ahead of
the Radeon 9700 Pro with an without AA enabled. The
A300 also outran the 9800 Pro at default settings, by a
considerable margin, but once again the Radeon 9800 Pro
proved to be the "faster" card when AA was enabled.
The trend continued when the resolution was raised to
1600x1200. The Radeon 9800 Pro won every test
regardless of what settings were used. With AA enabled
at 1600x1200, the Radeon 9700 Pro also pulled ahead of the
A300 Ultra. The GeForce FX 5800 Ultra sure could use
some extra memory bandwidth...
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Overclocking With The
WinFast A300 Ultra TD MyVIVO |
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Cranking Up The Clock Speeds... |
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DEFAULT CLOCK SPEEDS |
OVER-CLOCKED
527MHZ CORE / 545MHZ MEM |
Overclocking the
Leadtek A300 Ultra TD turned out to be a fruitless endeavor.
We used the "Coolbits" registry hack to enable clock speed
adjustments from within NVIDIA's drivers. We then
raised clock speeds slowly, and saw no significant changes
in performance until we hit a core speed of about 525MHz and
performance dropped by roughly 5%. We thought
core temperatures were getting too high when the card was
overclocked, so we took some temperature readings and found
things were running well within specifications.
SYSTEM IDLE
SYSTEM AFTER TWO LOOPS OF
3DMARK03 WHILE OVERCLOCKED
The GeForce FX
5800 Ultra GPU's speed will be reduced if temperatures get
too high, but we never even came close to hitting the 140
degrees C shown above. So, as it stands now we don't
have any meaningful overclocking results to report.
NVIDIA really had to push hard to get core speeds up to
500MHz with the NV30 though, so don't expect any monumental
overclocks with GeForce FX 5800 Ultra cards.
The Leadtek
WinFast A300 Ultra TD MyVIVO is an interesting product, but
it is ultimately overshadowed by competing products based on
ATi's flagship GPU. The Leadtek card is fast and it's
"quieter" than other GeForce FX 5800 Ultras, but
unfortunately it is just as hard to find. The Radeon
9800 Pro on the other hand, is faster, it's quieter and it's
readily available at many retailers worldwide. The
WinFast A300 Ultra TD MyVIVO is also one of the most
expensive gaming cards out there, with an MSRP of $439.00
US. If you're dead-set on purchasing a GeForce FX 5800
Ultra though, you'd be hard pressed to find a better product
than the WinFast A300 Ultra. Simply put, Leadtek has
made the best of bad situation. The Leadtek WinFast
A300 Ultra TD MyVIVO has an excellent bundle, a great
cooling solution and brings useful Video-In and Video-Out
capabilities to the table. Had we gotten the chance to
look at this card last year, our rating would probably have
been higher, but based on its limited availability,
relatively high price and the fact that the Radeon 9800 Pro
outperformed it in most instances, we're giving the Leadtek
WinFast A300 Ultra TD MyVIVO a
7.5 on the
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