System setup and notes, issues
In testing the X1900 GT, we wanted to see how it fared against ATI's recently launched uber-card, the X1950 XTX, along with what its CrossFire performance would be like. We've got results from camp NVIDIA too, of course.
| NVIDIA platform | ATI platform | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 LGA775 (2.93GHz, 4MiB L2 cache, dual-core) | |||
| Motherboard | NVIDIA NF5 590 SLI Intel Edition Reference board | Asus P5W-DH Deluxe (975X+ICH7R) | ||
| Memory | 2GBytes (2 x 1GByte) Corsair EPP - 4-4-4-12 @ DDR2-800 | |||
| Graphics cards | NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT 256MB (450/660 - single and SLI) | NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 1GB (500/600) | HIS X1900GT IceQ3 Dual DL-DVI VIVO 256MB GDDR3 (574/594) (single and CrossFire) | ATI Radeon X1950XTX 512MB (648/999) |
| Graphics BIOS | 5.71.22.12.30 | 5.71.22.24.88 | 009.012.005.002 | 009.012.005.002 |
| Driver | ForceWare 91.31 | Catalyst 6.8 | ||
| Hard drive | 160GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 (3Gb/s mode) | |||
| Monitor | Dell 2405FPW | |||
| OS | Windows XP Professional SP2 | |||
While not the fastest card, the X1900 GT is still up at the high end with the big boys, so we're taking it for a spin on our Core 2 Extreme-powered platform. It's up against an X1950XTX, GeForce 7950 GX2 and GeForce 7900 GT single and SLI'd. Brace yourselves for a high-end single- and dual-GPU battle.
The eagle eyed folk amongst you will note the presence of no CrossFire edition card in our lineup. No dongles here! We'll be visiting this in more detail in another article, so for now we'll just show you have two HIS X1900 GTs perform in dongle-less CrossFire.
Testing software
- Far Cry v1.33
- Quake 4 v1.4
- Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
It's the usual gamut of HEXUS 3D benchmarks, run at the resolutions of 1600x1200 and 1920x1200. Far Cry and SC:CT use 4xAA and 8xAF, whilst we run Quake 4 with 4xAA 16xAF. We also ran HDR tests in SC:CT.
Issues
During our graphics card and system testing we also ran 3DMark 2006, although we don't tend to publish figures from the tests. We found graphics corruption in certain tests in 3DMark with this card, but witnessed no artifacts in any of our other benchmarks. We believe the problem is likely to be driver related rather than a problem with the product.
