System setup and notes
Hardware
| Graphics cards | Gecube FZ Cool X1950 PRO 512MB (574/1387) | Sapphire X1950 PRO Ultimate 256MB (580/1593) | Sapphire X1950 PRO 256MB (580/1400) | XFX Geforce 7900GS 256MB GDDR3 Extreme Edition (480/1400) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 LGA775 (2.40GHz, 4MiB L2 cache, dual-core) | |||||
| Motherboard | Asus P5W-DH Deluxe (975X+ICH7R) | NVIDIA NF5 590 SLI Intel Edition Reference board (NVIDIA NF5 590 SLI) | ||||
| BIOS revision | 1305 | 2.053.42 | ||||
| Memory | 1GBytes (2 x 512MByte) OCZ26671024ELDCGE-K PC5400 | |||||
| Memory timings and speed | 4-4-4-8 @ DDR2-667 | |||||
| Disk drive(s) | 160GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 (3Gb/s mode) | |||||
| Mainboard software | Intel Inf 8.0.1.1002 | ForceWare 9.37 | ||||
| Graphics driver | Cat 6.10 | ForceWare 91.47 | ||||
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, w/ SP2, 32-bit | |||||
Software
| 3D Benchmarks |
Far Cry v1.33 Quake 4 v1.04 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05 |
|---|
Notes
We're comparing the performance of the GeCube X1950 Pro 256MiB FZ Cool card against the Sapphire X1950 Pro ULTIMATE and its vanilla X1950 Pro and, from the green camp and weighing in at around the same money, the XFX GeForce 7900 GS 256MiB Extreme Edition.The trickle-down effect of technology now positions these powerful GPUs in the midrange sector, with retail examples available for around £115. That's why we've chosen to test them with our Intel Core 2 Duo midrange system; the kind that setup that any one of these four GPUs would be used in.
Gaming performance was evaluated at 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. We ran 4xAA and 8xAF at the lower resolution and just 8xAF at 1600x1200. We feel that the settings are indicative of the kind of resolutions/quality a midrange graphics card should be able to provide, and the kind of monitors (TFTs, presumably) that folks would use with these kinds of systems. Due to the fact the GeCube card ships with 800MHz GDDR3 memory, exactly the same as the Sapphire ULTIMATE’s, we’ve manually overclocked the FZ cool to an effective 1593MHz and left the core speed untouched, making it run at 574/1593, and just a touch slower than the Sapphire ULTIMATE’s 580/1593.
