I will be using the following benchmarks: 3DMark2001SE, 3DMark03, Quake 3, and Unreal Tournament 2003. I will be benchmarking with the resolutions of 1024×768, 1280×1024, and 1600×1200. Unfortunately during the time of this review I had no other video card to compare against. The best way I could think of to do some comparisons was to overclock the card as much as possible and compare it to the stock speeds. I know this is not the best or optimal methodology however I thought it would be better than simply doing the stock speed testing. When I get another video card to review I should be able to compare it to that and at that time update this review. The stock speeds of tihs video card are 475 MHz core and 950 MHz memory. The best overclock I could get out of this video card was 512 MHz core and 1.02 GHz memory which is really nice.
Test Bed
- Albatron K8X800 Pro II
- AMD Athlon64 3200+
- 60GB Seagate Barracuda IV HDD
- 1024MB PC3200 Corsair TwinX
- XFX GeForceFX 5700 Ultra
- Koolcase’s Panther
- Plextor 708A DVD burner (review to come)
- SilenX 400w PSU
- Zalman CNPS7000A-Cu
3DMark2001SE is a DirectX 8 benchmark and is the predecessor to 3DMark03 however I feel it is still a good benchmarking program. The scores are quite impressive with this video card and the overclocked there is a noticeable amount of increase in score.
3DMark03 is one of the newest synthetic benchmarking programs from Futuremark and widely used for comparison of video cards. To get a good score with 3DMark03 you will need a really fast DirectX 9 video card which this is. The scores are not incredible compared with other faster video cards currently on the market however they are much better than I have seen with many comparable cards. Normally with 3DMark03 you are going to be looking at scores in the hundreds and hoping to get into the thousands. Then again if you are looking to get the highest scores possible from this benchmark you are going to have to pay a lot of money for the newest video card out.
Quake 3 is an obvious choice for a benchmark because it is still used by many sites and users. Using demo001 the scores are 1024×768 are really high. When increasing the resolution to benchmark at the scores dropped quite a bit which normally doesn’t happen. It seems that at 1024×768 the card really isn’t being tested too well. With the higher resolution I think we get a better picture of how the card compares.
Unreal Tournament 2003 is a really good and graphically stressful game. In the flyby section of the benchmark the card does really well even at 1600×1200 which until recently wasn’t able to be done. With the card overclocked there isn’t a huge increase in frames per second however it should be noted.
Unreal Tournament 2003 does has a second half of the benchmark where it dose a botmatch. With this part of the benchmark the frames per second are much lower. The botmatch is going to be a better representation of how actual game play will be because it is of course a first person shooter. The benchmark actually is done from a third person view however it gives you a good idea of what you should expect while actually playing.
