Sapphire Radeon X850 XT PE: AGP 8X
Test System & 3DMark05
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: To test the Sapphire Radeon X850 XT PE AGP, we used an MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum nForce based motherboard, powered by an AMD Athlon 64 4000+ CPU and 1GB of Corsair XPert RAM. 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 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 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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| Hardware: Motherboards - Video Cards - Memory - Audio - Hard Drive - Optical Drive - Other - Software: Operating System - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - |
AMD Athlon 64 4000+ processor (2.4GHz) MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum nForce3 / nForce4 chipsets Radeon X850XT PE AGP Radeon X850XT PE (PCIe) Radeon X800XL GeForce 6800 Ultra GeForce 6800 GT 1024MB Corsair XMS XPert PC3200 RAM CAS 2 Integrated on board Western Digital "Raptor" 36GB - 10,000RPM - SATA Lite-On 16X DVD-ROM 3.5-inch Floppy Drive Windows XP Professional SP2 (Fully Patched) nForce Drivers v6.53 DirectX 9.0c NVIDIA Forceware v71.89 ATI Catalyst v5.4 |
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;) 3DMark05 |
3DMark05 is the latest installment in a line of synthetic 3D graphics benchmarks, dating back to late 1998. 3DMark99 came out in October 1998 and was followed by the DirectX 7 benchmark, 3DMark2000, roughly two years later. The DirectX 8.1-compliant 3DMark2001 was released shortly thereafter, and became a very popular tool used by many hardcore gamers. 3DMark05, is a relatively advanced DirectX 9 benchmarking tool however. We ran 3DMark05's default test (1,024 x 768) on all of the cards and configurations we tested and have the overall results for you posted below. |
The Sapphire Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition shared the top spot in this benchmark with its PCI Express based counterpart. The X850XTs scored roughly 500-600 points higher than a GeForce 6800 Ultra, and about 650-750 points higher than a 6800 GT. The Radeon X800 XL also performed well in this test, besting the GeForce 6800 GT by a narrow margin.
