Radeon HD 2400 XT system setup and notes
Hardware
| Graphics cards | AMD Radeon HD 2400 XT GDDR3 256MiB | Palit GeForce 8500 GT 256MiB |
|---|---|---|
| Price (expected) | £46 | £52 |
| Shader Model | 4.0 | |
| GPU Clock Speed (MHz) | 695 | 450 |
| Shader Clock Speed (MHz) | 695 | 900 |
| Memory Clock Speed (MHz) | 1584 | 800 |
| Memory Bus Width (Bits) | 64 | 128 |
| Memory bandwidth (GB/s) | 12.672 | 12.80 |
| CPU | AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ AM2 (2.20GHz, 1MiB L2 cache, dual-core) | |
| Motherboard | Sapphire PI-AM2RS690MHD - ATI RS690+SB600 | ASUS M2NPV-VM - NVIDIA NF430+GF6150 |
| Motherboard BIOS | 2K070211A | 0504 |
| Memory | 1GByte (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 | CATALYST 7.1 southbridge package | NVIDIA platform driver 8.26 |
| Graphics driver | 8.38.9.1-070613a-048915E-ATI (Cat 7.7 BETA) | ForceWare 158.22 |
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, w/ SP2, 32-bit | |
Software
| 3D Benchmarks |
Far Cry v1.33 Quake 4 v1.30 - Medium quality Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05 |
|---|
Notes
Here are the same games run at lower resolution settings, to match the cards' credentials. We've compared the Radeon HD 2400 XT 256MiB to a Palit GeForce 8500 GT 256MiB, and both should be priced at around the £50 mark.The platform has been changed to reflect a low-end setup likely to be used with such cards.
It's another game of swings and roundabouts as far as comparing the architectures is concerned. The GeForce 8500 GT has roughly the same shading power and memory bandwidth, run with slower memory through a double-wide (128-bit) interface. Having 8 ROPs should give it the edge in pure fillrate and antialiasing.
Benchmarks were conducted at 1024x768 and 1280x1024, without antialiasing or anisotropic filtering applied. As always, we ran each benchmark a trio of times and then calculated the arithmetic mean. If any of the three results looked erroneous, we threw all three away until we could collect three within a margin of statistical error. We report any major attempts needed to get three reliable results, of course. Apart from that, things are as noted on the graphs and in the graph commentary.
