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• AMD Athlon XP3200+ 'Barton' Processor, 2200MHz, 512KB L2 cache, 11 x 200MHz, Socket A
• Asus A7N8X Deluxe 2.0 motherboard, nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset, Socket A
• 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3200 memory, CL2, 6-2-2, DDR400 on the Asus motherboard
• Hercules ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
• ATI Radeon 9600
• Sapphire Atlantis ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
• Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148 w SP1
• ATI CATALYST 3.4
• NVIDIA nForce 2.41 platform drivers
• NVIDIA Detonator FX 44.03 Display driver
• DirectX 9.0 Runtime
• 3DMark 2001SE v330
• UT2003 Retail (Build 2225)
• Comanche 4 Demo
• Serious Sam 2 Demo
• Quake3 v1.30
• Codecreatures Benchmark Pro
The usual test system as seen recently. AMD's finest, Corsairs damn-near-finest, Asus' finest, 3 of ATI's finest. No NVIDIA boards to compare it with, simply because I don't have current access to high end NVIDIA at the time of writing. We'll rectify that in future articles. Instead, it goes up against the previous performance king (and still the undisputed price/performance leader), 9700 Pro, and also ATI's new midrange card, 9600 Pro. That should give us a broad spectrum of performance to talk about and fawn over before coming to a conclusion.
Brutal cut and paste to show how we get the numbers for the graphs. As always, each result is the result of a 3 test run, with the top and bottom results discarded and the middle one kept. If the 3 sampled results aren't within 2% of each other, they are all discarded and the 3 samples taken again. 6 benchmarks with 3 settings to be sampled per benchmark, per card. 3 tests x 3 samples x 6 benchmarks x 3 cards = 162 tests at a minimum.
Core clocks for each card were 400/700 for the Radeon 9600 Pro, 325/630 for the 9700 Pro and 380/680 for the Hercules. The mix of architectures and core improvements means that the raw numbers don't tell the whole story, so we better digest some graphs to see what's going on.
Now, what benchmark to go with first. Ah, I know, the one I always lead with.
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