System setup and notes
Hardware
| Graphics cards | Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 512MiB OC | HIS Radeon HD 3650 IceQ Turbo 512MiB | HIS HD 2600 XT IceQ 256MiB | Foxconn GeForce 8600 GT OC 256MiB | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Current price | £52 | £57 | £68 | £60 | ||
| Shader Model | 4.1 | 4.0 | ||||
| Stream processors | 120 | 120 | 120 | 32 | ||
| GPU clock speed (MHz) | 800 | 790 | 830 | 560 | ||
| Shader clock speed (MHz) | 800 | 790 | 830 | 1232 | ||
| Memory clock speed (MHz) | 1800 | 1780 | 1920 | 1620 | ||
| Memory bus width (Bits) | 128 | |||||
| Framebuffer size (MiB) | 512 | 512 | 256 | 256 | ||
| CPU | Intel Core 2 Extreme Q6700 LGA775 (2.66GHz, 8MiB L2 cache, quad-core) | |||||
| Motherboard | ASUS P5K Premium (P35+ICH9R) | eVGA NF68 (nForce 680i SLI) | ||||
| Motherboard BIOS | 0204 | P31 | ||||
| Mainboard software | Intel Inf 8.4.0.1016 | NVIDIA device driver 15.08 | ||||
| Memory | 4GiB (2 x 2GiB) GSkill PC8000 DDR2 | |||||
| Memory timings and speed | 5-5-5-15 2T @ 1066MHz | |||||
| PSU | Enermax Galaxy DXX 850W | Gigabyte ODIN GT 800W | ||||
| Monitor | Dell 30in 3007WFP - 2,560x1,600 | |||||
| Disk drive(s) | Seagate 160GiB SATAII (ST3160812AS) | |||||
| Graphics driver | ATI CATALYST 8.2 Beta 5 | NVIDIA ForceWare 169.25 | ||||
| Operating system | Windows Vista Business, 64-bit | |||||
Software
| 3D Benchmarks | Company Of Heroes: Opposing Fronts v2.103: DX9 and DX10 Enemy Territory: Quake Wars v1.2 (demo_00010.dem, map Valley) Lost Planet: Extreme Condition v1.004 built-in benchmark: DX9 |
|---|
Notes
Four cheap-ish discrete graphics cards are benchmarked against three good-looking games run at 1,280x1,024 and 1,680x1,050. The image-quality settings aren't quite as high as for our high-end setup - Radeon HD 3870, GeForce 8800 GTS, etc - so cross-comparing isn't possible.We'll further see if the cards' non-3D features, such as hardware-based high-definition video decode, works as well as the companies indicate in their PR bumf.
