MSI RX1800XT-VT2D512E
Our Test System & 3DMark06
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEMS: We tested our NVIDIA cards on an Asus A8N32-SLI nForce 4 SLIX16 chipset based motherboard. However, the ATI cards were tested on an ECS KA1 MVP Extreme motherboard based on the Radeon Xpress 200 chipset. Both systems used the same AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 processor and 1GB of low-latency Corsair XMS RAM, though. The first thing we did when configuring these test systems was enter each 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 chipset drivers available, 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 also disabled, the hard drive was defragmented, and a 768MB permanent page file was created on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's 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: AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 (2.6GHz) Asus A8N32-SLI nForce4 SLIX16 chipset ECS KA1 MVP ATI Radeon Xpress 200 CF Edition MSI RX1800XT-VT2D512E Radeon X1900 XTX Radeon X1800 XT GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB GeForce 7800 GTX 1024MB Corsair XMS PC3200 RAM CAS 2 Integrated on board Western Digital "Raptor" 36GB - 10,000RPM - SATA |
Operating System - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - Synthetic (DX) - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - OpenGL - |
Relevant Software: Windows XP Professional SP2 nForce Drivers v6.82 DirectX 9.0c NVIDIA Forceware v81.98 ATI Catalyst v6.1 Benchmarks Used: 3DMark06 v1.0.2 FarCry v1.33* F.E.A.R. Half Life 2* Quake 4* * - Custom Test (HH Exclusive demo) |
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;) 3DMark06 |
Futuremark recently launched a brand-new version of their popular benchmark, 3DMark06. The new version of the benchmark is updated in a number of ways, and now includes not only Shader Model 2.0 tests, but Shader Model 3.0 and HDR tests as well. Some of the assets from 3DMark05 have been re-used, but the scenes are now rendered with much more geometric detail and the shader complexity is vastly increased as well. Max shader length in 3DMark05 was 96 instructions, while 3DMark06 ups the number of instructions to 512. 3DMark06 also employs much more lighting, and there is extensive use of soft shadows. With 3DMark06, Futuremark has also updated how the final score is tabulated. In this latest version of the benchmark, SM 2.0 and HDR / SM3.0 tests are weighted and the CPU score is factored into the final tally as well. |
MSI's RX1800XT-VT2D512E performed much like a 'Built-by-ATI' Radeon X1800XT in 3DMark06's default tests. Its overall score fell in just behind the 256MB GeForce 7800 GTX because of the GeForce card's strong performance in the Shader Model 2.0 tests, but in the more taxing Shader Model 3.0 / HDR tests, the MSI RX1800XT-VT2D512E was much faster than a 256MB GTX. The 512MB GTX and X1900, though, were clearly superior.
