System setup and notes
Hardware
| Graphics cards | Inno3D iChiLL GeForce 8800 GT 512MiB | ZOTAC GeForce 8800 GT 512MiB AMP! Edition | ZOTAC GeForce 8800 GTS 512MiB AMP! Edition | Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Atomic 512MiB | HIS Radeon HD 3870 X2 1,024MiB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Current pricing, including VAT | £189 | £199 | £229 | £175 | £290 |
| Shader Model | 4.0 | 4.1 | |||
| Stream processors | 112 | 112 | 128 | 320 | 640 |
| GPU clock speed (MHz) | 700 | 700 | 678 | 825 | 825 |
| Shader clock speed (MHz) | 1,500 | 1,674 | 1,728 | 825 | 825 |
| Memory clock speed (MHz) | 2,000 | 2,000 | 1,944 | 2,400 | 1,800 |
| Memory bus width (Bits) | 256 | ||||
| CPU | Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 LGA775 (3.0GHz, 8MiB L2 cache, quad-core) | ||||
| Motherboard | eVGA NF68 (nForce 680i SLI) | ASUS P5E3 Deluxe WiFi-AP (Bearlake X38) | |||
| Motherboard BIOS | P31 | 0504 | |||
| Mainboard software | NVIDIA device driver 15.08 | Intel Inf 8.4.0.1016 | |||
| Memory | 4GiB (4 x 1GiB) DDR2-1066 | 4GiB (4 x 1GiB) DDR3-1066 | |||
| Memory timings and speed | 5-5-5-15 2T @ 1,066MHz | 7-7-7-20 2T @ 1,066MHz | |||
| PSU | Gigabyte ODIN GT 800W | Enermax Galaxy DXX 850W | |||
| Monitor | Dell 30in 3007WFP - 2,560x1,600 | ||||
| Disk drive(s) | Seagate 160GiB SATAII (ST3160812AS) | ||||
| Graphics driver | NVIDIA ForceWare 169.25 | NVIDIA ForceWare 169.04 | CATALYST 7.12 | CATALYST 8.2 BETA | |
| 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: DX10 |
|---|
Notes
The Inno3D iChiLL GeForce 8800 GT runs at the same core and memory clocks as ZOTAC's recently-reviewed AMP! edition. The one performance parameter in ZOTAC's favour is its elevated shader clock of 1,674MHz - or 11.6 per cent faster than the Inno3D's. Both constitute heavily overclocked retail interpretations of the GeForce 8800 GT SKU, though.Note, too, that the ZOTAC and Inno3D cards are run with different drivers, although the difference between the 169.04 and 169.25 largely rests with support for the GeForce 8800 GTS 512 SKU, here represented by another ZOTAC AMP! Edition.
We've thrown in Sapphire's Radeon HD 3870 Atomic for good measure, continuing the overclocked theme, and bookended the comparison with the £290 HIS Radeon HD 3870 X2, reviewed here. It's not a natural competitor to the Inno3D offering, sure, but provides a yardstick to evaluate performance by.
We've run our three games with the in-game settings fixed at high/very high and at suitably card-taxing resolutions, with antialiasing/anisotropic filtering applied. We'll note any testing anomalies during benchmark commentary, of course.
Our transition to Microsoft Vista Business 64-bit hasn't been without its share of problems. The most pressing issue relates to obtaining reproducible numbers on a consistent basis. We have seen that Vista performance is inherently more variable than that of Windows XP, such that the deviation between sets of runs on the same card has been as high as 15 per cent. Running practically countless iterations has helped eliminate the majority of the variance.
