NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT: XFX Style
Our Test System & 3DMark05
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested the XFX GeForce 7800 GT on a Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI nForce 4 SLI chipset based motherboard, powered by an AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 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-55 (2.6GHz) Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI nForce4 SLI chipset XFX GeForce 7800 GT GeForce 7800 GTX GeForce 6800 Ultra (x2) GeForce 6800 GT ATI Radeon X850XT PE ATI Radeon X800 XL 512MB 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 v77.77 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, dating back to late 1998. 3DMark99 came out in October 1998 and was followed by the DirectX 7 benchmark; 3DMark2000, which was released roughly two years later. The DirectX 8.1-compliant 3DMark2001 was released shortly thereafter and became a very popular tool used by many hardcore gamers. 3DMark03, however, wasn't quite as well received thanks in no small part to the disapproval of graphics giant NVIDIA. With 3DMark05, though, Futuremark hopes to regain some of its audience with a versatile and advanced DirectX 9 benchmarking tool. We ran 3DMark05's default test (1,024 x 768) on all of the cards and configurations we tested, and have the overall results for you posted below. |
Throughout this article, we'll be spotlighting two sets of benchmark scores specifically, the XFX GeForce 7800 GT and the 7800 GT clocked at NVIDIA's reference specifications. As we mentioned earlier, NVIDIA's reference specifications call for a 400MHz core clock frequency and a 1GHz memory clock. XFX's 7800 GT though has its core significantly overclocked to 450MHz with its memory clocked at 1.05GHz.
As you can see in the graph above, the XFX card's 60MHz core clock speed advantage and slightly faster memory give it a significant lead in 3DMark05 over a card clocked at NVIDIA's reference specs, and allow it to almost catch the mighty GeForce 7800 GTX.
