System setup and notes
Hardware
| Graphics cards | HIS Radeon HD 2900 Pro Limited Edition 512MiB | Sapphire Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MiB | ASUS EN8800GTS 640MiB | ASUS EN8800GTS 320MiB | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shader model | 4.0 | ||||
| GPU Clock Speed (MHz) | 600 | 743 | 513 | ||
| Shader Clock Speed (MHz) | 600 | 743 | 1188 | ||
| Framebuffer | 512MiB | 640MiB | 320MiB | ||
| Memory Clock Speed (MHz) | 1584 | 1656 | 1584 | ||
| Memory Bus Width (Bits) | 512 | 320 | |||
| CPU | Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 LGA775 (2.93GHz, 4MiB L2 cache, dual-core) | ||||
| Motherboard | ASUS P5K Premium WiFi AP Edition (P35 + ICH9R) | EVGA nForce 680i SLI | |||
| Mainboard software | Intel Inf 8.3.0.1013 | NVIDIA platform driver 9.53 | |||
| Memory | 2GiB (2 x 1024) Corsair PC8500 EPP | ||||
| Memory timings and speed | 4-4-4-12 2T @ 800MHz (PC6400) | ||||
| PSU | Enermax Galaxy DXX 850W | FSP Epsilon 600W | |||
| Monitor | Dell 3007WFP - 2560x1600 | ||||
| Disk drive(s) | Seagate 160GB SATAII (ST3160812AS) | ||||
| Graphics driver | CATALYST 7.7 | ForceWare 158.19 | |||
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, w/ SP2, 32-bit | ||||
Software
| 3D Benchmarks |
Far Cry v1.33 Quake 4 v1.30 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05 |
|---|
Notes
The natural comparison is with a stock-clocked GeForce 8800 GTS 320 that is available for around the same outlay - £175. We've also added in the Pro's bigger brother and the GeForce 8800 GTS 640 - NVIDIA's equivalently-priced (~£240) graphics card.Benchmarks were run in high-quality mode, right up to 2560x1600.
As always, we ran each benchmark a trio of times and then calculated the arithmetic mean. If any of the three results looked erroneous, we threw all three away until we could collect three within a margin of statistical error. We report any major attempts needed to get three reliable results, of course. Apart from that, things are as noted on the graphs and in the graph commentary.
