System setup and overclocking
Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.
- Intel Pentium4 2800MHz S478 Northwood CPU Northwood
- ABIT IT7-MAX i845E run in unsupported DDR356 mode (A4 BIOS)
- ATI Radeon 9700 Pro (324/620)
- NVIDIA reference GeForce4 Ti 4600 (300/648)
Common components
- 256MB Corsair XMS3200 C2 run at 2-5-2-2 at asnychronous 178MHz memory mode
- Western Digital 120JB 120GB Hard Drive.
- Liteon 16x DVD
- Samcheer 420w PSU
- Creative Audigy Soundcard(disabled for tests)
- D-Link 530FX NIC
- 21" Sony G500 FD monitor
- 17" Samsung 171P TFT
- Alpha 8942 cooler
Software
- Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
- Windows XP Service Pack 1
- Intel 4.00.109 chipset drivers
- Intel application accelerator drivers
- ATI Catalyst 2.2 (6143) drivers
- Detonator XP 40.41 drivers
- 3DMark 2001SE
- Quake 3 Arena v1.30 PR
- Codecreatures Pro benchmark
- Serious Sam 2 Demo
- Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault
Notes
I'll be conducting all benchmarks at 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200x32 respectively. Vertical synch' is disabled, and graphical options are set to best quality. We've seen just what a difference anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering can make, let's now investigate just how well the Radeon 9700 Pro performs.
Overclocking
With over 100 million transistors on a 0.15-micron process, the Radeon 9700 does get warm extremely quickly. The whole card emits a lot of heat when stressed during gaming. Couple that with a relatively quiet fan and you're probably thinking that GPU, or VPU as ATi now refer to it, has limited scope for overclocking.
Using Rage3D Tweak 3.6, one that you probably saw in the control panel options on the previous screen, I raised the VPU clock by 10MHz at a time and ran the high dragothic element in 3DMark 2001SE three times to ensure basic stability. The card was housed in my PC in a normal manner with a number of PCI cards. I wanted to see what it would do in a normal PC environment, not in some air-conditioned lab.
I gained decent stability at 355MHz core. It would go as high as 365MHz for shorter periods without additional cooling, but it wasn't what I'd call stable. The memory was stable at a frequency of 335MHz (670MHz) from the stock of 310MHz,
Here's how Rage3D saw it.
