X-bit labs

eVGA e-GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and PowerColor RADEON 9800 XT: Extreme Overclocking and More! (page 7)

Category: Video

by Tim Tscheblockov

[ 01/04/2004 | 09:43 PM ]

The card comes with DVI-I, D-Sub and TV-Out connectors. There is a connector at the other end of the PCB to attach additional power:

The card carries an ATI RADEON 9800 XT VPU and 256MB of DDR SDRAM in chips from Hynix with a cycle time of 2.5ns:

The nominal clock-rate of the graphics chip is 412MHz. When Overdrive function is enabled, it grows up a little bit, but I didn’t use this mode in order for the results to be repetitive. The graphics memory on the PowerColor card works at 730MHz (365MHz DDR).

I think we’ve got two worthy competitors, let’s test them now against each other.

Testbed and Methods

The testbed was configured as follows:

• Intel Pentium 4 3000MHz CPU;
• ASUS P4C800 mainboard (i875 chipset);
• 2x512MB PC3200 CL2.5 DDR SDRAM from TwinMOS.

We used the following software:

• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP1;
• DirectX 9.0b;
• Catalyst 3.9 for the PowerColor RADEON 9800 XT;
• ForceWare 53.03 for the EVGA e-GeForce FX 5950 Ultra.

The cards were tested using 4x full-screen anti-aliasing (FSAA) and 8x anisotropic filtering (AF). I enabled AF both in the “quality” mode (the “Quality” setting for both cards) and in the “fast” mode (“Performance” for the PowerColor RADEON 9800 XT and “High Performance” for the EVGA e-GeForce FX 5950 Ultra).