System setup and notes, overclocking
Hardware and Software
| Processor | AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (Winchester) @ 2.55GHz |
| Motherboard | ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe, BIOS 1013 |
| Memory | 2x512MiB Corsair XMS3200XL |
| HyperTransport clock | 255MHz x 4 |
| Memory timings | 2.5-2-2-5 2T @ 425MHz |
| Graphics Card #1 | PixelView 7800 GTX (430/1200 & 463/1260) |
| Graphics Card #2 | XFX GeForce 6800 GT (350/1000 & 400/1080) |
| Disk subsystem | 3x 80GB Seagate 7200.7 in NVIDIA SATA RAID-0 |
| Operating System | Windows XP Pro SP2 |
| Graphics Drivers | ForceWare 77.77 |
Tests
Futuremark 3DMark05 Build 1.2.0 - 0xAA 0xAF & 4xAA 8xAF
DOOM 3 v1.3 - Timedemo 1 - 0xAA 8xAF & 4xAA 8xAF
Half-Life 2 - custom HEXUS benchmark - 0xAA 0xAF & 4xAA 8xAF
Given that this is more of a snapshot review, the test set is cut down and modified somewhat. We started the testing at 800x600, although it's a very low resolution it should help us see where any CPU limitations are. 1024x768 is a popular gaming resolution, and many TFT users will be enjoying 1280x1024, so that's the max resolution used in these tests.
The system itself is similar to what the majority of gamers who've gone the route of AMD64 will have. The processor has been clocked as fast as it can go, pushing the RAM a little above its spec (but not its capabilities) so the timings aren't overboard. More tweaking would surely result in more performance gains, but there comes a point when a gamer tires of tweaking and wants to actually put their rig to use.
Overclocking
It would be rude of us not to overclock this card, so we did a fairly casual bit of overclocking. After doing some 3DMark runs to warm things up a tad we used the coolbits registry entry and the NVIDIA control panel to automatically find the best overclock. The resultant speeds were less of a bump up than were obtained with this reviewer's GeForce 6800 GT, as you can see in the above system spec. You'll see in the benchmarks what affect overclocking had on performance.
