System setup and notes
Hardware
| Graphics cards | Sapphire Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MiB | ASUS EAH2900XT 512MiB | NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX 768MiB | ASUS EN8800GTS 640MiB | ASUS EN8800GTS 320MiB | Current pricing | £233 | £249 | £365 | £245 | £190 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shader model | 4.0 | ||||
| GPU Clock Speed (MHz) | 743 | 575 | 513 | ||
| Shader Clock Speed (MHz) | 743 | 1350 | 1188 | ||
| Framebuffer | 512MiB | 768MiB | 640MiB | 320MiB | |
| Memory Clock Speed (MHz) | 1656 | 1800 | 1584 | ||
| Memory Bus Width (Bits) | 512 | 384 | 320 | ||
| CPU | Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 LGA775 (2.93GHz, 4MiB L2 cache, dual-core) | ||||
| Motherboard | ASUS P5K Premium WiFi AP Edition (P35 + ICH9R) | ASUS P5W-DH Deluxe (i975X + ICH7R) | EVGA nForce 680i SLI | ||
| Mainboard software | Intel Inf 8.3.0.1013 | Intel Inf 8.0.1.1002 | NVIDIA platform driver 9.53 | ||
| Memory | 2GiB (2 x 1024) Corsair PC8500 EPP | 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 | CATALYST 7.7 BETA | ForceWare 158.19 | ||
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, w/ SP2, 32-bit | ||||
Software
| 3D Benchmarks |
Far Cry v1.33 Quake 4 v1.30 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05 |
|---|
Notes
The obvious comparison cards are the ASUS EAH2900XT and ASUS EN8800GTS 640; both are priced at roughly equivalent levels. We've also added in a more expensive GeForce 8800 GTX 768MiB (£365) and cheaper ASUS EN8800GTS 320 (£190), to see what kind of value proposition they offer as DX10-supporting high-end cards.3D Benchmarks were conducted at 1600x1200, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600, with 4x antialiasing and 8/16x anisotropic filtering applied.
It's important to note that we've tested the Sapphire card with Catalyst 7.7 drivers. The comparison ASUS EAH2900XT was tested with slightly older Catalyst 7.7 betas.
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.
