System setup and notes
Hardware
| Graphics cards | Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 Pro GDDR3 256MiB | AMD Radeon HD 2400 XT GDDR3 256MiB | ATI Radeon X1650XT | Palit GeForce 8500 GT 256MiB | Price (expected) | £65 | £47 | £65 | £52 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shader Model | 4.0 | 3.0 | 4.0 | |
| GPU Clock Speed (MHz) | 695.25 | 695.25 | 574 | 450 |
| Shader Clock Speed (MHz) | 695.25 | 695.25 | 574 | 900 |
| Memory Clock Speed (MHz) | 1386 | 1584 | 1350 | 800 |
| Memory Bus Width (Bits) | 128 | 64 | 128 | |
| 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 @ DDR2-629 for AMD and DDR-631 for NVIDIA | |||
| 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) | CATALYST 7.6 | ForceWare 158.22 | |
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, w/ SP2, 32-bit | |||
| 3D Benchmarks |
Far Cry v1.33 Quake 4 v1.30 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05 |
|---|
Notes
AMD's aggressive pricing on its Radeon HD 2000-series family has pushed its 2600 PRO and 2400 XT firmly into the low-end.The pre-overclocked Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 currently retails for around £65 - the same price, now, as the previous-generation's Radeon X1650 XT. We'll investigate how it compares to the DX9-capable forerunner.
We've also added in a £50 GeForce 8500 GT. We note that NVIDIA's current DX10 pricing is such that the next GPU up, the GeForce 8600 GT, is priced at around £85.
3D 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.
AMD's focus has been on highlighting total card attributes, including video-decode and image quality, so let's hop to it.
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