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HOW WE
CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM:
We tested the
Gigabyte GV-R98P128D
on the i875P "Canterwood" based MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R
motherboard, powered by a Pentium 4 3.0CGHz CPU (800MHz Bus). The first thing we did when configuring this
test system was enter the BIOS and loaded "High Performance
Defaults". Then we set the memory to operate at 200MHz
(Dual DDR400), with the CAS Latency
and other memory timings set by SPD. The AGP aperture
size was then set to 256MB. The hard
drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with
SP1 was installed. When the Windows installation was
complete, we installed the Intel chipset drivers and then
hit the Windows Update site to download and install all of the
available updates, with the exception of the ones related to Windows
Messenger. Then we installed all of
the necessary drivers for the rest of our components and Windows Messenger was disabled and removed the system.
Then Auto-Updating and
System Restore were disabled, the hard drive was
de-fragmented and then a 768MB permanent
page file was created. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual
Effects to "best performance", installed all of the
benchmarking software and ran all
of the tests at our CPU's default clock speed. All of the
tests were run with ATi's and NVIDIA's drivers configured
for maximum visual quality. ATi's
"Quality" Antialiasing and Anisotropic filtering
methods were employed throughout our testing, while the
Performance slider available on NVIDIA's "Performance and
Quality" driver tab was set to "Quality". For the
"4X AA + Aniso" tests
listed in our graphs, we enabled 4X AA and 8X Anisotropic
filtering in both NVIDIA's and ATi's driver panels.
Now, for the results...
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HotHardware's Test Setup |
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It's
the Top of the Line! At Least For Now! |
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Common
Hardware:
Intel Pentium 4
Processor 3.0GHz / 800MHz System Bus
MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R
512MB (256MB x2) Corsair XMS3200C2
Seagate Barracuda V 7200 RPM SATA 120GB Hard Drive
Common
Software:
Windows XP with SP1
DirectX 9.0a
Intel Chipset Software v5.00.1012
Intel Application Accelerator RAID Edition v3.0
Video Cards
Tested:
Gigabyte GV-R98P128D Radeon 9800 Pro (128MB)
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (128MB)
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro (128MB)
NVIDIA GeForce
FX 5900 (128MB)
Video Drivers
Used:
ATI
Catalyst Drivers v3.6 - WHQL Certified
NVIDIA Detonator FX Drivers v44.67 - WHQL Certified
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Performance Comparisons
With
Gun
Metal |
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DirectX Gaming |
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For our first set of tests, we
used the relatively new Gun Metal benchmark developed by
Yeti Studios. This benchmark, like all of the
others we used in this review, is based on an actual game
engine. Gun Metal uses Vertex Shader 2.0 and Pixel
Shader 1.1 operations in the creation of the game world.
This test is heavily GPU limited, and because Yeti's intent
was to stress all modern 3D accelerators, Antialiasing (2x)
and Anisotropic filtering are enabled by default, and cannot
be disabled..
Throughout this review, we
compared the Gigabyte GV-R98P128D's performance to an NVIDIA
GeForce FX 5900 (128MB), a Radeon 9600 Pro and another Radeon
9800 Pro, using the newest WHQL certified drivers available.
We used the Catalyst v3.6 driver package with all of the ATi
powered cards, and v44.67 of NVIDIA's Detonator FX drivers
with the 5900. As you can see, the Gigabyte card was
the fastest Radeon in the group, at both resolutions, but
the 5900 held a significant 10% lead over the completion.
More DirectX
Testing |