System Setup, Notes, Issues
For the tests we used two machines, one based on an Intel P4 Granite Bay chipset and the other an AMD shod nForce 2. DirectX 9 was installed on both systems. Both cards were installed with the default driver configuration without any tweaks made - to give you out of the box performance.
Common components
- nVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra Graphics Card with 128MB Ram (Stock) - 4263 nVIDIA drivers
- Sapphire Radeon 9700 Pro Graphics card with 128MB Ram (Stock) - Catalyst 3 Drivers
Intel Setup
- Pentium 4 3.06 CPU with Hyper-Threading enabled
- Asus P4G8X Deluxe Granite Bay motherboard
- 2 x 512Mb Sticks of Corsair XMS 3500 CAS2 Ram in Dual DDR Mode
- 80GB Seagate SATA hard drive
- Windows XP Pro
AMD Setup
- AMD XP2700 CPU
- MSI nForce2 motherboard
- 2 x 256MB sticks of Corsair XMS 3500 CAS2 Ram in Dual DDR Mode
- Windows XP Home
- 120GB Western Digital SE Drive
.
Of course there are some differences with the above systems but these will not cause "issues" within the benchmarks - since we are purely pushing the GPU.
When installing the card in both systems it was very easy, the advantage of the use of of an industry standard power connector is that their is an abundance of these within the system unlike with the Floppy connector - this made it very easy. The card is also very solid to use and run - so it wasn't an issue to install in either system. Of course we have to use 2 slots but that is not an issue in any system bar the Shuttle XPC range.
As you can see the FX sits happily in the P4G8X system.
The nVIDIA drivers which we used were very interesting - they are new FX based ones and they had some menus which we had not seen before.
