NVIDIA GeForce 6800
Test System & Final Fantasy XI
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 on an i875P based DFI LANPARTY Pro 875 motherboard, powered by an Intel Pentium 4 3.2CGHz CPU. The first thing we did when configuring this test system was enter the BIOS and loaded the "High Performance Defaults". Then we set the memory to operate at 200MHz in dual-channel mode, with the CAS Latency and other memory timings set by the SPD, and then we set the AGP aperture size to 256MB. The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with SP1 was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed the Intel chipset drivers and hit the Windows Update site to download and install all of the available updates. Then, we installed all of the necessary drivers for the rest of our components and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating, System Restore and Drive Indexing were then 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 the benchmarking software and ran all of the tests.
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| Hardware: Processor - Mainboard - Video Cards - Memory - Audio - Hard Drive - Optical Drive - Other - Software: Operating System - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - |
Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz DFI LANPARTY Pro 875 i875P "Canterwood" Chipset ATi Radeon X800 Pro ATi Radeon 9800 Pro BFG GeForce 6800 GT OC GeForce 6800 GT GeForce 6800 (128MB) GeForce FX 5950 Ultra 1024MB Kingston HyperX PC3500 CAS 2 Integrated SoundMax Audio Western Digital "Raptor" 36GB - 10,000RPM - SATA Lite-On 16X DVD-ROM 3.5" Floppy Drive Windows XP Professional SP1 (Fully Patched) Intel INF v6.0.1.1002 DirectX 9.0b ATI Catalyst v4.6 NVIDIA Forceware v61.45 |
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 Final Fantasy XI |
The Final Fantasy franchise is well known to console gamers, but Squaresoft has since made the jump to the PC with a MMORPG version of this classic. The Final Fantasy XI benchmark runs through multiple scenes from the game and displays a final score every time a full cycle of the demo is completed. Although the demo is meant the check an entire system's readiness to play the game, the number of frames rendered scales when different video cards are used. Lower scores indicate some frames were dropped to complete the demo in the allotted time. The scores below were taken with the demo set to its "High Resolution" option (1024x768), with anti-aliasing disabled. |
The GeForce 6800 GT and Radeon X800 Pro posted the highest scores in the Final Fantasy XI benchmark, but the GeForce 6800 was right up there with them. The Radeon 9800 XT also pulled ahead of the GeForce 6800 by a paltry 79 frames in this test - a difference of only 1.3%. The GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, however, couldn't quite keep up with the 6800, getting beat by approximately 18.5%.
