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The test system we chose is the same one that we have used in our recent video card reviews. We chose the fastest parts for our test system in order to impose as little a bottleneck as possible:
Test System Configuration |
| CPU: |
Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz) |
| Motherboard: |
AW9D-Max (LGA 775) |
| Chipset: |
Intel 975X |
| Chipset Drivers: |
NVIDIA nForce 9.35 |
| Hard Disk: |
Western Digital Caviar WD1600JS 160GB SATA 7200 RPM |
| Memory: |
Corsair XPS CM2X1024-6400C3 (1GB x 2) |
| Video Drivers: |
ATI Catalyst 6.11
NVIDIA ForceWare 97.92 |
| Display/ Native Resolution |
Dell 3007WFP / 2560 x 1600 |
| OS: |
Windows XP Service Pack 2 - Updated as of October 2006 |
The chosen operating system was Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 updated with all fixes as of October 2006. For NVIDIA solutions we used Forceware 97.2 drivers while for ATI solutions we used Catalyst 6.11 drivers.
display Dell 3007WFP
A fundamental part of reviewing next generation video cards is the display, and so we chose to test using the Dell 3007WFP. We test using a variety of resolutions in this article, but the smallest resolution we test with is 1280x1024. Anisotropic filtering is always set at 16x, primarily because we want to stress these video cards as much as we possibly can.
Gainward Bliss 8800 GTS 320 Mbytes Golden Sample
overclocked frequencies
Gainward Bliss 8800 GTS 320 Mbytes Golden Sample
forcing it to standard Geforce 8800 GTS 320 Mbytes speeds also forces shader speed to be less than default values
As we discussed earlier in the article, the sample Gainward sent us had been pre-overclocked. Although we would have been able to lower the sample’s memory and core frequencies to default frequencies using Riva Station, this would have also resulted in the stream processors’ frequency also being automatically lowered to below default speeds. Because of this, we opted upon keeping the overclocked frequencies of the card throughout our tests.
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