Sapphire Radeon X1900 GT
Test System and 3DMark05 Scores
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested the Sapphire Radeon X1900 GT on a MSI P4N Diamond 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 nForce 4 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) MSI P4N Diamond nForce4 SLI chipset Sapphire Radeon X1900 GT NVIDIA GeForce 7900GT NVIDIA GeForce 7800GT ATI Radeon X1800 XL 1024MB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 Integrated Seagate Barracuda V 7,200RPM - SATA |
Operating System - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - Synthetic (DX) - Synthetic (DX) - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - OpenGL - |
Relevant Software: Windows XP Professional SP2 nForce Drivers v7.13 DirectX 9.0c NVIDIA Forceware v84.21 ATI Catalyst v6.6 Benchmarks Used: 3DMark05 v1.2.0 3DMark06 v1.0.2 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05 X3: Reunion DEMO F.E.A.R. v1.0.5 Quake4 v1.2* * - 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. |
Sapphire's X1900 GT scores an early impressive win in 3DMark05, besting the 7900 GT by a decent amount. The approximate 300 point difference between the two cards amounts to a 4% boost in performance for the X1900 GT. We noted, however, that the difference in core clock speed between the two cards (575MHz vs. 520MHz) is more on the lines of 10%, something to consider when we move on to the other benchmarks.
