ABIT RX600XT-PCIE
LGA Test Configuration
To test the PCI-E video cards, we assembled an absolutely canonical system made up of Intel's i925X motherboard, 3.4Mhz Extreme Edition processor, a Matrix RAID mounted with two Matrox MaxlineIII SATA disks. Even the MSI's SATA CD-Rom was taken just in case - for the purity of experiment. The DDR2 533MHz memory made up of two 512MB bars completes this configuration of top-end total price. The system had to be powered from a new-format PSU (24pin + power cable SATA) made by HiPRO - HP-W460GC31 (460W). Not so much of a "budget" system :), but with it you can forget about upgrading the video card test facility for the coming year and a half.
| CPU |
P4 3.4MHz Extreme Edition 800FSB LGA
P4 3.6Mhz 800FSB LGA
P4 3.2Mhz 800FSB LGA |
| Mb |
Intel D925XCV (i925X) |
| Memory |
PC2-4300 (533MHz DDR2) 2x256Mb in the dual-channel-mode
Memory latency timings - 4:4:4 |
| HDD |
Matrox MaxlineIII SATA, 2x250Gb Matrix RAID |
| CD-ROM |
MSI XA52P COMBO Writer SATA |
| OS |
WinXP + SP1 + DirectX 9.0b |
| Drivers |
ForceWare 61.11
Catalyst 4,7 |
Frankly, we had to take a lot of trouble over the test facility. The thing is, the first PCI-E video card that arrived proved to be broken, and the test configuration wouldn't start up for two days. It was impossible to figure out what was wrong having new components in singletons - the board does not offer external diagnostics. In the end, after two days of unsuccessful experiments there came ABIT RX600XT which started up at last. Two days afterwards, there came two more PCX5900 cards by Gigabyte, and two MSI's cards - RX600XT and PCX5750. With none of those cards there were compatibility and stability issues. Moreover, for two weeks of merciless runs the test stand neither reset nor hung, which was a real surprise. Even now we can safely assert that Intel did a thorough job preparing the transition and worked a lot with the partners developing standards, drivers, overcoming compatibility issues of components.
By the way, the corporate vocabulary of Intel has no word like "partnership", - instead, they say "customer". So, the whole Taiwan for Intel is a "customer" :-)
A few words on the drivers and BIOS. The existing version of WinXP + SP1 is absolutely unaware of where it is put. All the necessary drivers for correct system operation take up as much as two disks, and the installation is not an issue but for one - the lack of time. The number of drivers is too great, nor they are all certified. As rumors have it, WinXP SP2 will contain the whole original set of necessary drivers for the LGA775 platform.
The new BIOS is two big - over 2 Mb. Remember that the BIOS for i865/875 was much smaller in size - about 400 kb. Since new versions are released almost once every week (the platform is continuously polished), the first happy owners of the LGA will have to frequently do the troublesome re-flashing procedure. By September, all this fever should go down, and the system will take its proper form.
For NVIDIA PCX cards, we used ForceWare 61.11, taken from NVIDIA's FTP-resource for developers and the press.
Test software:
Synthetic benchmarks:
- Sandra 2004 + Service Pack 2 (SP2);
- PCMark2004 Patch 120;
- 3DMark2003 Patch 340;
- 3DMark2001SE Patch 330;
- Codecreatures v1.0.0 (a DirectX 8.1 application, shaders on, Hardware T&L);
Gaming benchmarks:
- Unreal Tournament 2003 (Direct3D, Hardware T&L, vertex shaders, Dot3, cube texturing.);
- Unreal Tournament 2004
- AquaMark 3 (DirectX 9.0, Vertex Shaders 1.1/1.4/2.0, Pixel Shaders 1.1/1.4/2.0, Hardware T&L, AquaMark3 Triscore mode);
- HALO: Combat Evolved 1.2 (DirectX 9.0, Vertex Shaders 1.1/1.4/2.0, Pixel Shaders 1.1/1.4/2.0, Hardware T&L, quality set to the maximum possible);
- Gun Metal Benchmark 2 v1.20s (a DirectX 9.0 benchmark, Vertex Shaders 2.0, Pixel Shaders 1.1, Hardware T&L);
- X2: The Threat Demo (Direct3D, multitexturing, Dot3, running in the benchmark mode embedded in the demo version);
- Final Fantasy XI Official Benchmark 2 (a benchmark for assessing the performance in Final Fantasy XI. The developers haven't presented any data on the gaming engine);
- Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness v49 (DirectX 9.0, Vertex Shaders 2.0, Pixel Shaders 2.0);
- Half-life 2 leaked beta (DirectX 9.0, Vertex Shaders 2.0, Pixel Shaders 2.0);
- FireStarter (DirectX 8.1/DirectX 9.0, pixel and vertex shaders, particle system, dynamic lights, projected textures);
- FarCry ver1.1 (DirectX 9.0, Pixel Shaders 2.0, our own demo "3Dnews001" was used).
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