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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, 1003 BIOS
• 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3200 memory, CL2, 6-2-2, DDR400
• MSI GeForce FX 5900-TD128 (MS-8929)
• Hercules ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
• Sapphire Atlantis ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
• GeForce FX 5600 Ultra rev2
• ATI Radeon 9600 Pro
• Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148 w SP1
• ATI CATALYST 3.4
• NVIDIA Detonator FX 44.03 reference drivers
• NVIDIA nForce 2.41 platform drivers
• DirectX 9.0 Runtime
• 3DMark 2001SE v330
• UT2003 Retail (Build 2225)
• Comanche 4 Demo
• Serious Sam 2 Demo
• Quake3 v1.30
• Codecreatures Benchmark Pro
Nothing untoward. I didn't benchmark with the leaked 44.65's in this article due to time contraints, I'll leave those numbers for a forthcoming comparo with an ASUS partner board. Both ATI boards were rebenchmarked with the CATALYST 3.4 driver set available officially from ATI.
AMD's finest provides the backup power, all 2200MHz and 200MHz front side bus of it.
NVIDIA's 5600 Ultra v2 reference board and 9600 Pro provide the midrange thrills and spills to give you a good idea where all your hard earned is going when you invest in the high end.
MSI's board is a pure high end consumer solution, make no mistake. The interesting thing will be where it benchmarks compared to the ATI high end behemoths. Hold on to your panties.
Oh, one last thing, here's the driver settings used for the base graphs. When moving to our 4xAA and 8xAF settings, only the AA and AF sliders were adjusted. Overall Intellisample rendering method was left at the 'Quality' setting at all times. Texture sharpening was disabled for all tests, as was vertical frame sync.
For the testing, 4xAA on the GeForce FX boards means 4x. Not Quincunx (soft 4x with 2x performance, a nice looking mode in my opinion) or 4XS which is a Direct3D only mode, just plain old 4x.
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