Sapphire Toxic X800 Pro ViVo

Test System and Final Fantasy Benchmark

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM:
We tested on an i865PE "Springdale" based Asus P4P800 Deluxe motherboard, powered by an Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU (800MHz System Bus).  The first thing we did when configuring this test system was enter the BIOS and load the "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 and the AGP aperture size set to 256MB. The hard drive was formatted and Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 was installed.  After the installation completed, we installed the latest Intel chipset drivers and then hit the Windows Update site to download and install all of the available updates, with the exception of the items related to Windows Messenger. Next, we installed DirectX 9.0b and all of the necessary drivers for the rest of our components and Windows Messenger was disabled and removed from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were also 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 all of the tests. All of the benchmarking was done with ATi's and NVIDIA's drivers configured for maximum visual quality. 

The HotHardware Test System
Intel Powered Screamer

Video Cards Compared:

Sapphire "Toxic" Radeon X800 Pro

NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT
NVIDIA GeForce 6800
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra

Benchmarks Used:

Aquamark3
Comanche 4 Demo

Far Cry
Final Fantasy XI Benchmark 2
Halo v1.031
Splinter Cell - Oil Rig Demo
Unreal Tournament 2004
Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory

Common System Hardware:

Asus P4P800 Deluxe (i865PE) Motherboard
Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz CPU
512MB (256MB x2) Kingston HyperX PC3500 DDR

Integrated SoundMax audio
Western Digital 20GB ATA100 Hard Drive
Lite-On 16X DVD-ROM


Software / System Drivers:

Windows XP Professional Service Pack 1
DirectX 9.0b
Intel Chipset Software, v6.0.1.1002
ATi Catalyst Drivers, v4.7
NVIDIA ForceWare Drivers, v61.72

Performance Comparison With Final Fantasy XI Benchmark 2 v1.01
A Classic Console Franchise On The PC

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.



Right off the bat, we've got the Sapphire Toxic X800 Pro locking horns with NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 and 6800 GT.  The 6800 GT pulled into the top spot with a score of 4731, but the 6800 only held a slim lead over the Sapphire Toxic.  The 6800 and X800 Pro are much more comparable feature wise and the difference between the two cards resulted in less than a percent - completely meaningless in any benchmark.  All three of these cards outpaced the older GeForce FX 5950 Ultra by 12-15%, even though they are running at same or lower processor speeds.  


Tags:  Sapphire, App, SAP, Toxic, pro, X8, AP

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