Tech-Hounds.com

Performance

Now for the performance evaluation. Since all these cards use the same reference design, they offer roughly the same level of performance. The Gigabyte X700 Pro 256 MB running at 427 MHz for the core and 433 MHz DDR for the memory is a hair faster than the ASUS EAX700Pro TVD 256 MB running at 425 MHz and 433 MHz DDR. The MSI RX700 Pro TD128E is the slower card, running at 420 MHz and 433 MHz DDR. So, you see, memory capacity is not the most important issue here.

We didn't experience any problems with any of the cards. Installation was smooth as you can get. Before looking at the test results, we encourage you to read our 'How We Evaluate' article so you understand how we conduct our test and benchmarks. More importantly, you will also see how each benchmarks react with our test setup. We only put the average, minimum and maximum fps in this evaluation to keep it brief, excluding the per second fps progress graph.

Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 'Newcastle' socket 939
2 x 256 MB Kingston KVR 3-3-3 PC3200 DDR-SDRAM
MSI K8N NForce 4 SLI motherboard
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
ASUS E-616 DVD-ROM
450 watts ATX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 5.4 reference driver
NVIDIA NForce system driver version 5.1 (motherboard supplied driver)
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit integrated (motherboard supplied driver)
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest, final builds.

The results:

There's no surprise here, all cards are more than enough to push three digit frame rates with Call of Duty. With 4x FSAA and 16x AF, we could still maintain average frame rates above 100 in 1024x768. Higher resolution does impart a performance penalty, here we see the 256 MBs cards pull away a little bit, but still at most only 10 to 13 % faster. It's really safe to say that all of them (even the 128 MBs MSI RX700 Pro TD128E has more than enough processing power for 1024 x 768, 32 bit gaming, just right for their price.


With the shadow resolution set to 'High', all the boards barely have enough power to push this demo. Since Splinter Cell is shader heavy, memory capacity doesn't improve performance much here, although there's a slight difference. Even so, the differences between the boards are not significant (a difference of 5 %). The minimum fps is the same, so looks like we need to get a faster processor if we want to use the X700 Pro boards above 1024x768, 32 bit in Splinter Cell.

[Previous Page]
[Go to top]
[Next Page]