Testbed and Methods

We performed our tests on a testbed configured like follows:

• AMD Athlon 64 4000+ CPU (2.4GHz, 1MB L2 cache);
• ABIT KV8 Pro mainboard;
• OCZ PC-3200 Platinum EB DDR SDRAM (2x512MB, CL2.5-3-2-8);
• Samsung SpinPoint SP1213C hard disk drive (Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer);
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card.

Software:

• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2, DirectX 9.0c;
• ATI CATALYST 5.3;
• NVIDIA ForceWare 71.89.

We compared the ASUS N6600 GT/TD with the following graphics cards:

• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT 256MB (350/1000MHz);

• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 128MB (325/700MHz);
• ATI RADEON X800 PRO 256MB (475/900MHz)
   for details see our article called Clash of the Titans: ATI RADEON X800 PRO and ATI RADEON X800 XT Against the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra;
• ATI RADEON 9800 XT 256MB (412/730MHz)
  for details see our article called ASUS RADEON 9800 XT and LeadTek WinFast A380 TDH Ultra: The Battle for AquaMark3;

Following our standard procedure, we enabled the ForceWare optimizations, except the Anisotropic mip filter optimization. The Image Settings slider was set to “Quality”. In ATI’s Catalyst driver we set the Catalyst A.I. option to “Standard” and Mipmap Detail Level to “Quality”. The VSync option was disabled for both ATI Catalyst and NVIDIA ForceWare.

If the game allowed turning full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering on, we used this option. Otherwise we forced the necessary mode from the driver. We didn’t edit any configuration files. We selected the highest graphics quality settings in each game, the same settings for cards from ATI and NVIDIA. The following games and applications were used:

First Person 3D Shooters:

• Doom III
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• The Chronicles of Riddick
• Far Cry
• Painkiller: Battle Out of Hell
• Half-Life 2

Third Person 3D Shooters:

• Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow
• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

Simulators:

• Il-2 Sturmovik: Aces in the Sky
• Lock On: Modern Air Combat
• Colin McRae Rally 2005

Strategies:

• Warhammer 40.000: Dawn of War
• Perimeter

Semi-Synthetic Benchmarks:

• Aquamark3
• Final Fantasy

Synthetic Benchmarks:

• Futuremark 3DMark03
• Futuremark 3DMark05