Asus Extreme N7800GTX Top - GeForce 7800 GTX
Test System & 3DMark05 Performance
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested our ASUS Extreme N7800GTX Top cards on an ASUS A8N SLI Premium nForce 4 SLI chipset-based motherboard, powered by an AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 processor and 1GB of low-latency Corsair XMS RAM. The first thing we did when configuring this test system was enter the BIOS and loaded the "High Performance Defaults." The hard drive was then formatted and Windows XP Professional with SP2 was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed the latest nForce 4 chipset drivers, installed all of the other necessary drivers for the rest of our components, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were then disabled, the hard drive was defragmented, and a 768MB permanent page file was created on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of the benchmarking software, and ran the tests.
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Motherboard - Video Cards - Memory - Audio - Hard Drive -
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Hardware Used: AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (2.8GHz) ASUS A8N SLI Premium nForce4 SLI chipset ASUS Extreme N7800GTX Top (x2) - 486MHz Core / 1.35GHz Memory BFG GeForce 7800 GTX OC - 460MHz Core / 1.3GHz Memory GeForce 6800 Ultra ATI Radeon X850XT PE 1024MB Corsair XMS PC3200 RAM CAS 2 Integrated on board (ALC850) Western Digital "Raptor" 36GB - 10,000RPM - SATA |
Operating System - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - Synthetic (DX) - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - OpenGL - OpenGL - |
Relevant Software: Windows XP Professional SP2 (Patched) nForce Drivers v7.13 DirectX 9.0c NVIDIA Forceware v77.76 ATI Catalyst v5.7 Benchmarks Used: 3DMark05 v1.2.0 Halo v1.06 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.03 FarCry v1.31* Half Life 2* Doom 3 v1.3* Chronicles of Riddick v1.1* * - Custom Test (HH Exclusive demo) |
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;) 3DMark05 |
3DMark05 is the latest installment in a line of synthetic 3D graphics benchmarks from Futuremark Corp that date back to late 1998. The benchmark itself isn't based on a playable game engine, but it does boast fairly impressive DX9-driven visuals and lighting effects. It's also a versatile DirectX 9 benchmarking tool that we feel is relative in terms of presenting our readers a full performance profile for 3D graphics and host processors. It's not a metric that you can exclusively gauge real-world performance on but rather a complement to our entire suite of application-based testing. We ran 3DMark05's default test (1,024 x 768) on all of the cards and configurations we tested. |
Here we're showing the performance of just one ASUS Extreme N7800GTX Top card with our 3DMark 05 default test. However, in many of the game tests in the pages ahead, we've tested an SLI setup with these new cards, as well. Furthermore our overclocking tests near the end are based on 3DMark05 and will include overclocked SLI numbers.
In any event, as you can easily see in the scores above, the ASUS Extreme N7800GTX Top performs about 5% faster than the BFG GeForce 7800GTX OC, due to its out-of-the-box stock speed of 468MHz Core/1.35GHz Memory versus BFG's 460MHz/1.3GHz clocked card. As an aside, our intent in this article was to show you performance of these new ASUS GeForce 7800GTX boards versus some of the faster competitive versions on the market, which is why we chose to compare it to the BFG card. Comparing the performance of the Extreme N7800GTX Top versus a stock reference design card, clocked at 430MHz/1.2GHz, would obviously show an even larger advantage for the ASUS Extreme N7800GTX Top.
