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HOW WE
CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM:
The Leadtek
WinFast A350 TDH MyViVo and Abit Siluro FX 5900 OTES were
tested on an i875P "Canterwood" based MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R
motherboard, powered by a Pentium 4 3.0CGHz processor
(800MHz Bus). The first thing we did when configuring
this test system was enter the BIOS and loaded "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. The AGP aperture size
was then set to 256MB. The hard drive was then
formatted, and Windows XP Professional with SP1 was
installed. When the Windows installation was complete,
we installed the Intel chipset drivers and then hit the
Windows Update site to download and install all of the
available updates, with the exception of the ones related to
Windows Messenger. Then we installed all of the
necessary drivers for the rest of our components and Windows
Messenger was disabled and removed from the system.
Then Auto-Updating and System Restore 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 all of the
benchmarking software and ran the tests at our CPU's default
clock speed. All of the benchmarking was done with
ATi's and NVIDIA's drivers configured for maximum
visual quality. ATi's "Quality" Antialiasing
and Anisotropic filtering methods were employed throughout
our testing, while the Performance slider available on
NVIDIA's "Performance and Quality" driver tab was set to
"Quality". For the "4X AA + Aniso" tests
listed in our graphs, we enabled 4X AA and 8X
Anisotropic filtering in both NVIDIA's and ATi's
driver panels.
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HotHardware's Test Setup |
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Not
Quite Top of the Line! |
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Common
Hardware:
Intel Pentium 4
Processor 3.0GHz / 800MHz System Bus
MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R
512MB (256MB x2) Corsair XMS3200C2
Seagate Barracuda V 7200 RPM SATA 120GB Hard Drive
Common
Software:
Windows XP with SP1
DirectX 9.0a
Intel Chipset Software v5.00.1012
Intel Application Accelerator RAID Edition v3.0
Video Cards
Tested:
Leadtek
WinFast A350 TDH MyVIVO (128MB)
Abit Siluro FX 5900 OTES (128MB)
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (128MB)
Video Drivers
Used:
ATI
Catalyst Drivers v3.5 - WHQL Certified
NVIDIA DetonatorFX Drivers v44.67
& v45.23
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Performance Comparisons
With
Gun
Metal |
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DirectX 9.0 Gaming |
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For our first
set of tests, we used the relatively new Gun Metal benchmark
developed by
Yeti Studios. Like all of the other benchmarks we
used in this review, Gun Metal is based on an actual game.
Gun Metal uses Vertex Shader 2.0 and Pixel Shader 1.1 ops in
the creation of its game world. Due to this fact, the
Gun Metal benchmark is heavily GPU & system bandwidth
limited, and because Yeti's intent was to stress all modern
3D accelerators, 2X Anti-aliasing and Anisotropic filtering
are enabled by default and cannot be disabled.
In this test,
the NVIDIA powered cards held onto a small lead over the ATi
Radeon 9800 Pro when we used the brand new v45.34 Detonator
FX drivers. However, when the v44.67 drivers were used
with the 5900 had a much larger margin of victory; in the
neighborhood of 20%. As expected, the performance of
the Leadtek and Abit cards are virtually identical when
using the same drivers. Only a fraction of frame per
second separate the Siluro and A350 at either resolution.
Next Up: More DirectX Testing
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