Testbed and Methods

To test ASUS EAX1800XT TOP we assembled the following test platform:

• AMD Athlon 64 4000+ CPU (2.40GHz, 1MB L2 cache)
• ASUS A8N-SLI Premium (Nvidia nForce4 SLI) mainboard
• OCZ PC3200 Platinum EL DDR SDRAM (2 x 1GB, CL2-3-2-5)
• Samsung SpinPoint SP1213C (Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer) hard disk drive
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card
• Enermax Liberty 620W (ELT620AWT) power supply
• Dell P1130 and Dell P1110 monitors (21”, 1800x1440@75Hz max display mode)
• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2 with DirectX 9.0c
• ATI Catalyst 6.1
• Nvidia ForceWare 81.98

The ATI and NVIDIA drivers were set up as usual.

ATI Catalyst :

• Catalyst A.I.: Standard
• Mipmap Detail Level: Quality
• Wait for vertical refresh: Always off
• Adaptive antialiasing: Off
• Temporal antialiasing: Off
• Quality AF: Off
• Other settings: default

Nvidia ForceWare:

• Image Settings: Quality
• Vertical sync: Off
• Trilinear optimization: On
• Anisotropic mip filter optimization: Off
• Anisotropic sample optimization: On
• Gamma correct antialiasing: On
• Transparency antialiasing: Off
• Other settings: default

We selected the highest graphics quality settings in each game, the same for ATI’s and Nvidia’s solutions, except for the Pacific Fighters flight simulator which requires vertex texturing support to enable its Shader Model 3.0 mode. The Radeon X1000 family doesn’t support this feature and runs the game in the Shader Model 2.0 mode. We did not edit the games’ configuration files, we used only the configuration options offered by the gaming engine. If possible, we used the games’ built-in benchmarking tools and if not, we measured the frame rate with the FRAPS utility. We measured minimal as well as average fps rates possible.

If the games allowed adjusting the full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering settings, we enabled FSAA 4x + AF 16x. Otherwise, we forced the necessary mode from the graphics card driver. If any of the gaming engines didn’t support FSAA, we didn’t run the tests in eye candy mode. Since the overclocking potential of the ASUS EAX 1800XT TOP turned out almost null, we decided not to run any tests of the overclocked platform, because the slight increase in the GPU and memory frequencies was very unlikely to affect the performance of the card in most tests. Besides ASUS EAX1800XT TOP, we also tested the following graphics solutions:

• Radeon X1900 XT (R580, 625/1450MHz, 48pp, 8vp, 256-bit, 512MB)
• Radeon X1800 XT 512MB (R520, 625/1500MHz, 16pp, 8vp, 256-bit, 512MB)
  for details see our article called ATI RADEON X1800 XT and XL Performance: Crushing NVIDIA's 7800?
• Radeon X1800 XL (R520, 500/1000MHz, 16pp, 8vp, 256-bit, 256MB)
  for details see our article called Driven by the New Catalyst: Sapphire RADEON X1800 XL Review
• GeForce 7800 GTX 512 (G70, 550/1700MHz, 24pp, 8vp, 256-bit, 512MB)
  for details see our article called NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512: Faster, Higher, Stronger!
• GeForce 7800 GTX (G70, 430/1200MHz, 24pp, 8vp, 256-bit, 256MB)
  for details see our article called NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX: Monstrous Gaming Performance Unleashed
• GeForce 7800 GT (G70, 400/1000MHz, 20pp, 7vp, 256-bit, 256MB)
  for details see our article called NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT: Full-Throttle Graphics for $449

These games and applications were used as performance benchmarks:

First-Person 3D Shooters

• Battlefield 2
• The Chronicles of Riddick
• Call of Duty 2
• Doom III
• Far Cry
• F.E.A.R.
• Half-Life 2
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
• Project Snowblind
• Quake 4
• Serious Sam 2
• Unreal Tournament 2004

Third-Person 3D Shooters

• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

Simulators

• Colin McRae Rally 2005
• Pacific Fighters

Strategies

• Age of Empires 3
• Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War

Semi-synthetic benchmarks

• Aquamark 3
• Final Fantasy XI Official Benchmark 3

Synthetic benchmarks

• Futuremark 3DMark03 build 360
• Futuremark 3DMark05 build 120
• Futuremark 3DMark06 build 120