ATI Radeon X1800 GTO 256MB Preview

Reviews: Hardware

Motherboards | Power Supplies | Memory | Systems | Video Cards

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Kurtis Kronk
Brian
ATI
Mar. 9, 2006

Specifications

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Test Setup

For our preview, we will be using three popular games for benchmarking: Half-Life 2, Quake 4, and Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay. These games vary greatly in their use of shader effects, and do a great job of stressing out video cards, so our testing should give you a good indication of what our findings will be in the full review.

The system we are using for benchmarking consists of an ASUS A8N-SLI Premium Socket 939 motherboard which utilizes the nForce4 chipset. An AMD Athlon64 FX-55 is used along with 2 GB of Corsair PC-3200 XMS XL Pro memory running in dual channel mode with 2-2-2-5 timings. Every component of the system is at stock or default speeds set by the manufacturer.

Windows XP was installed onto a freshly formatted Seagate NearLine 500GB SATA hard drive connected via on-chip SATA. All the latest Windows Updates were downloaded and installed. The latest video drivers at the time of testing were installed - Catalyst beta 8.223 certified drivers for the X1800 GTO, Catalyst 6.2 for the other ATI cards, and Forceware 81.98 drivers for NVIDIA cards.

In the video card control panel V-SYNC was disabled and the cards were set to "quality" over "performance." For the ATI cards that means the "Texture Preference" and "Mipmap Detail Level" were both set to "High Quality" while Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering were custom for each test. For NVIDIA cards, the "Image Settings" slider was set to "High Quality." V-Sync was disabled for all testing. Everything else was left to the default settings. Default quality levels for AA and AF were used as opposed to Transparency AA, High Quality AF!

To ensure the best possible results, we run each benchmark three times for each test and average the results. All of the games we have used for this preview allow us to play a recorded time-demo, which prints the average FPS (frames per second) when finished running.

Test Computer:

ASUS A8N-SLI Premium Socket 939 Motherboard (Donated by Directron.com)
AMD Athlon64 FX-55
2 GB Corsair TwinX PC-3200 XMS XL Pro Series (Dual Channels @ 2-2-2-5)
Seagate NearLine 500GB SATA Hard Drive (Donated by Seagate)
Enermax Liberty 620W SLI Certified Power Supply (Donated by Enermax)
Windows XP Professional SP2 w/ DirectX 9.0c and latest updates (Donated by Microsoft)

When analyzing the performance graphs on the following pages, I will sometimes refer to settings that offer the best gaming experience. To me, a good gaming experience offers the right mixture of speed and image quality as well as smooth gameplay. Playing a game at 50 FPS with smooth edges and crisp textures would offer a better overall gaming experience than playing at 100 FPS with "jaggies,' noticeable texture filtering and bogging-down in certain parts of the map. Personally, I think 40-50 FPS generally allows for a smooth experience and my comments will stem from that belief. Your opinions may differ. Of course, certain game genres will let you enjoy the gameplay with 20+ FPS, but we'll get into that in our full review.

We'd like to thank Directron.com for donating the ASUS A8N-SLI Premium Socket 939 Motherboard which we used for testing.

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: The Card
Page 3: Test Setup
Page 4: Benchmarks: Half-Life 2
Page 5: Benchmarks: Quake 4
Page 6: Benchmarks: Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay
Page 7: Closing Thoughts

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