System Setup and Notes
Hardware
- NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra Reference Board, NV40, 256MB, AGP8X, 400/1100
- ASUS ATI Radeon 9800XT/VTD, R360, 256MB, AGP8X, 412/730
- AMD Athlon FX-51, 1MB L2, 2200MHz
- ASUS SK8V, VIA K8T800, Socket 940
- 1GB Corsair XMS3500R, 2-3-2-6, DDR400
- Western Digital WD360G Raptor, SATA
Software
- Windows XP Professional w/SP1
- DirectX 9.0b Runtime
- NVIDIA Detonator Release 60, 60.72
- ATI CATALYST 4.4, Display Driver 8.00
- 3DMark 2001SE Build 340
- 3DMark03 v3.4.0
- Call of Duty v1.1.1412
- Unreal Tournament 2003 v2225
- X2 - The Threat
- Serious Sam: Second Encounter
- ShaderMark 2.0
- D3D RightMark 1.0.4.9 PB3
- Realtime High Dynamic Range Image-Based Lighting v1.2
- D3D FilterTest v1.3
- ATI Compressonator
- FRAPS 2.1
Notes
The page following discusses NVIDIA's 60.72 driver for NV40, so I'll skip that here. The usual gamut of HEXUS game tests won't make an appearance in this article. It's a GPU preview, not a retail card review. Retail NV40 board reviews will do everything you're used to.Synthetic and real-world tests get equal weighting. As always, everything is run three times and the top and bottom results discarded, leaving the median result for reporting. The triplet of tests is rerun in its entirety if any of the reported scores deviate from the others by more than 1%, ensuring accuracy.
For most performance tests, four resolution and image quality settings are tested. They are:
1024x768, no aniso, no antialiasing, full trilinear filtering
1024x768, 8X aniso, 4X antialiasing, full trilinear filtering
1024x768, 16X aniso 8X(NV40)/6X(R360) anti aliasing, full trilinear
1280x1024, 16X aniso 8X(NV40)/6X(R360) anti aliasing, full trilinear
The antialiasing discrepancy is down to NV40 not having an equivalent 6X AA mode (and R360 not doing 8X). Investigation of NV40's 8X AA performance is prudent and AA image quality analysis should make the 8X->6X comparison clear.
DVI problems
I couldn't make DVI work properly with the board, using a Hercules LCD monitor that I reviewed recently. I could see POST information hanging the monitor off either DVI port, but once the BIOS tries to init the bootloader, the display died. Using a DVI to VGA convertor made things work fine. I'm assured it's a problem with the monitor, but I'm not so sure. A retail sample would be nice, to confirm it.Power requirements
NVIDIA highly recommend using at least a 480W power supply, with each Molex connector supplied by a separate wire bundle from the PSU, not using a Y-splitter. So I put that to the test, running it with a Tagan TG480-U01 480W PSU, my old Enermax 431W beasty and a 300W thing I use in emergencies.
Using a Raptor SATA disk, another PATA disk, two optical drives and the SK8V/FX-51 combo to run it all, all three PSUs worked fine. The 300W would take a prod or two of the power button on my case to make it work, but once up and running, it was O.K. I'm not sure I'd want to run it with a 300W PSU for any length of time though.
The Tagan (a brilliant PSU) and Enermax were fine. Anything over 350W that's high quality (not some cheap tat you bought for £10) should be fine, provided you don't have more than a couple of HDDs or optical disks.
