System setup and notes
Hardware
| Graphics cards | XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX | ECS N8600GTS 256MX+ | Inno3D iChiLL 7900GS Arctic Cooling Silencer 6 | ASUS EAX1950PRO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shader Model | 4.0 | 3.0 | ||
| GPU Clock Speed (MHz) | 620 | 720 | 550 | 580 |
| Shader Clock Speed (MHz) | 1355 | 1450 | 550 | 580 |
| Memory Clock Speed (MHz) | 1600 | 2200 | 1500 | 1404 |
| Memory Bus Width (Bits) | 128 | 256 | ||
| CPU | Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.40GHz, 4MiB L2 cache, 1066MHz FSB, LGA775) | |||
| Motherboard | EVGA NF68 (NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI) | ASUS PW5-DH Deluxe (Intel i975X) | ||
| BIOS revision | 691N0P20 | 1305 | ||
| Memory | 1GByte (2 x 512MByte) OCZ26671024ELDCGE-K PC5400 | |||
| Memory timings and speed | 4-4-4-8 @ DDR2-667 | |||
| Disk drive(s) | 160GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 (3Gb/s mode) | |||
| Mainboard software | NVIDIA platform driver 9.53 | Intel Inf Update 8.0.1.1002 | ||
| Graphics driver | ForceWare 158.16 | ForceWare 93.71 | CATALYST 7.1 | |
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, w/ SP2, 32-bit | |||
Software
| 3D Benchmarks |
Far Cry v1.33 Quake 4 v1.30 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05 |
|---|
Notes
It's multi-purpose stream processing versus discrete vertex and pixel shading, or SM4.0 vs SM 3.0.It's a little complex attempting to compare unified superscalar architectures against vector-based, 'rigid' models, so we'll let the benchmarks do the talking. What's clear, though, is that the two SM3.0 cards enjoy a huge bandwidth advantage over the 128-bit-equipped G84s in this lineup.
Benchmarks were conducted at 1280x1024 4xAA 8xAF and 1600x1200 no AA 8xAF. These are likely resolutions and image quality settings for midrange cards, and we've run the cards through three popular games.
As always, we ran each benchmark a trio of times and then calculated the arithmetic mean. If any of the three results looked erroneous, we threw all three away until we could collect three within a margin of statistical error. We report any major attempts needed to get three reliable results, of course. Apart from that, things are as noted on the graphs and in the graph commentary. Want to know more? Head for the HEXUS.community.
On a final note, we've purposely not compared the shipping XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX against the new midrange Radeon HD 2600 series: they're not shipping for a while yet.
