Introduction
While working on the testing for this article on Avivo, I obviously had cause to test with an ATI Radeon X1000-series graphics board. For nearly every bit of graphics testing that I'll do for HEXUS.core, I'll build a separate system with a clean OS install and test with that. I did just that for the Avivo piece, initially dusting off Old Faithful, a just-so FX-57 and nForce SLI platform that hosts the vast majority of testing that I'll do with graphics hardware.That's really the only way to do it for graphics performance testing, starting from scratch on a known hardware and software setup that's predictable, faithful, reliable and produces repeatable performance results, per product you're testing. The key words there are performance testing, and I mean that in a frames-per-second sense. While it's imperative to level the playing field when doing absolute performance testing in that way, if your testing concerns other facets that aren't absolutely performance critical, why not get a little reuse out of an existing setup that's purring away and working, by just throwing the card in there instead? It saves on rebuild and setup time and other logistical nightmares that can get in the way of getting the actual testing done.
That thought stayed with me until I'd done the testing for the Avivo article on Old Faithful and I'd switched to my workstation to get the writing done. This workstation is one I've maintained over the years, using a mix of my own hardware and cool bits and pieces that hang around because of work here at HEXUS. It's a high-end box, in terms of the base components, but I've noticed many a forum user outpacing this box in terms of their own hardware and what they run. So it's not cutting edge in that sense, and I have no hardware in here that's unreleased, or anything like that.
The graphics board is a GeForce 7800 GTX, watercooled. It serves a range of purposes, not least in letting me get my game on after working hours, but mostly it's handy, because of all the graphics and video work I do, to have something I'd normally be working with anyway in my most used system, just incase I need to quickly test a new driver build or game patch, or look deep at the hardware for some theory work I'm doing. Watercooled means its very quiet, and I'll come back to that later.
If you've read the referenced Avivo piece, you'll notice that a fair bunch of the testing isn't concerned with how fast pixels are drawn, but how good they look. In that sense, a clinical test of the hardware and software wasn't entirely needed, since you can be confident that, due to the nature of the testing and it being mostly video based, if you have a stable and looked-after system you'll be alright. So the idea was formed in my head that - since I trust my workstation to do its job implicitly, and that I know it inside and out - why not throw the Radeon X1K board I was using for testing into my workstation alongside the 7800 GTX, and see if I could get them cooperating so some side-by-side work in the same system could be done.
This article outlines how that went, what the end result is, and what I now wish for in terms of building my ultimate workstation, dedicated to good graphics work.
