System setup and notes
Hardware
| Graphics cards | ASUS EAH2900XT 512MiB | AMD Radeon X1950 XTX 512MiB | ASUS EN8800ULTRA 768MiB | GeForce 8800 GTX 768MiB | ASUS EN8800GTS 640MiB | Current pricing | £250 | £200 | £420 | £340 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shader Model | 4.0 | 3.0 | 4.0 | ||||
| GPU Clock Speed (MHz) | 743 | 648 | 612 | 575 | 513 | ||
| Shader Clock Speed (MHz) | 743 | 648 | 1500 | 1350 | 1188 | ||
| Memory Clock Speed (MHz) | 1656 | 1998 | 2160 | 1800 | 1584 | ||
| Memory Bus Width (Bits) | 512 | 256 | 384 | 320 | |||
| CPU | Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 LGA775 (2.93GHz, 4MiB L2 cache, dual-core) | ||||||
| Motherboard | ASUS P5W-DH Deluxe (975X+ICH7R) | EVGA nForce 680i SLI | |||||
| Mainboard software | Intel Inf 8.0.1.1002 | NVIDIA platform driver 9.53 | |||||
| Memory | 2GiB (2 x 1024) Patriot XLBK | 2GiB (2 x 1024) Corsair PC8500 EPP | |||||
| Memory timings and speed | 4-4-4-12 2T @ 800MHz (PC6400) | ||||||
| PSU | Enermax Galaxy DXX 850W | FSP Epsilon 600W | |||||
| Monitor | Dell 3007WFP - 2560x1600 | ||||||
| Disk drive(s) | Seagate 160GB SATAII (ST3160812AS) | ||||||
| Graphics driver | CATALYST 7.7 BETA (8.38.9.1-070613a-048915E-ATI) | ForceWare 158.22 | ForceWare 158.19 | ||||
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, w/ SP2, 32-bit | ||||||
Software
Quake 4 v1.30
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05
Notes
We've added in some high-end competition by which to evaluate the two ASUS cards' performance by.3D Benchmarks were conducted at 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 with 4x antialiasing and 8/16x 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.
