I will be using 3DMark2001SE, 3DMark2003, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 2003, and Serious Sam 2 to benchmark this video card. All of the testing was done with all the settings turned up and everything at it’s highest. I will be benchmarking with the resolutions of 1024×768, 1280×1024, and 1600×1200. With Unreal tournament 2003 I used 1280×960 because the benchmark tool did not have 1280×1024 as an option. I used nVidia’s 43.45 detonator drivers and ran all the tests from my system which was just formatted.
Test Bed:
- Abit NF7-S Rev 2.0 (review to come)
- 1800+ Thoroughbred
- 60GB Seagate Barracuda IV HDD
- 80GB Western Digital HDD
- 1024MB PC3200 Corsair TwinX (review to come)
- XFX GeForceFX 5600 Ultra
- Koolcase’s Panther
- Plextor 40x12x40 CDRW
- Plextor PX-504A DVD+RW (review to come)
- Globalwin Sapphire 520w PSU (review to come)
3DMark2001SE is a DirectX 8 benchmark and is the predecessor to 3DMark03 however I feel it is still a good benchmarking program. In all three tests the Ti4200 did a little better than the 5600 Ultra and 5200 Ultra. The Ti4200 is a DirectX 8 card and the FX cards are DirectX 9. The difference was not much but enough to where you can see a noticeable difference in the scores.
3DMark03 is one of the newest synthetic benchmarking programs from Futuremark and widely used for comparison of video cards. With 3DMark03 to get a good score you will need a really fast DirectX 9 video card. As you can see this 5600 Ultra does much better than both the Ti4200 and 5200 Ultra. The fact that this card is a DirectX 9 card is the reason that it does so much better than the Ti4200. Even the slower 5200 Ultra does better than the Ti4200 but is not even close to this 5600 Ultra.
Quake 3 is probably one of the most used game benchmark around the world and it will be used here as well. I set everything to the best settings then ran demo001 which is what I always use. With this benchmark the 5600 Ultra outperforms the other two cards by fair amount. There isn’t a huge difference between the three cards, none the less this 5600 Ultra does do the best.
