X-bit labs

ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer: Extremely Silent, Extremely Hot (page 25)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 10/19/2005 | 10:40 AM ]

Futuremark 3DMark05 build 120

The almost complete absence of any performance growth by ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer repeats in 3DMark05 : 74 points can hardly be considered a serious performance improvement. Unlike 3DMark03, overclocking doesn’t help our hero to win the race. It looks like the ASUS baby has a very dangerous competitor providing better performance during complex pixel shaders processing: ATI RADEON X1600 XT. Nevertheless, it makes perfect sense to take a closer look at the results of each test individually.

In Game 1 test we still see a bit of a performance gain, even in low resolutions. This gain doesn’t exceed 5%-10%, but it is undeniable. However, despite the action taking place in a space station, the game scenes are pretty broad and rich in textures and light sources. The use of 2048x2048 normal maps is also quite important. Even the overclocked ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer cannot catch up with RADEON X1600 XT, however it does have a chance to do it, when we switch to the eye candy mode. In this mode RADEON X1600 XT loses a lot of speed because of the driver issues and only 4 TMUs onboard. For the known reasons we couldn’t compare the results of ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer against those of GeForce 6800 and GeForce 6600 GT in this mode.