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Testing
Now the fun begins... For testing we'll be using 4 of today's most
popular games; Half-Life 2, Doom 3, Painkiller, and Call Of Duty.
Benchmarking games is the easiest and probably the best way to
compare video cards in the real world. As for actual benchmarking
programs, we will be using 3DMark01, 03 and 05. Not a one of those
programs are worth a darn when comparing ATi to nVidia, but they
are useful when comparing ATi to ATi or nVidia to nVidia. The two
brands of video cards are just too different to compare with
3DMark as there has been questionable code writing in the past
that may or may not cause the benchmark to favor one brand over
the other. For that reason, please pay more attention to the game
benchmark results than the 3DMark results. Now let's get to it,
starting with the games.
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Half-Life 2
Filtering mode: Trilinear
Antialiasing mode: none
1024x768: 46.83 fps
1600x1200: 46.64 fps
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Doom 3
Demo name: demo1
1024x768 92.4 fps
1600x1200 57.9 fps
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Painkiller
Map: C5L1
Antialiasing: none
Texture Filtering: Trilinear
1024x768: 62.96 min:
0.54, max: 66.67
1600x1200: 63.04 min: 0.58, max: 66.67
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Call Of Duty
Demo name:
Timedemo1.dm_2
1024x768 8.7 seconds:
176.3 fps
1600x1200 9.3 seconds: 164.1 fps
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3DMark2001 SE Pro
3DMark Score: 25004
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3DMark03
3DMark Score: 13677
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3DMark05
3DMark Score: 6111
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Cooling System Troubles...
After a couple hours of looping benchmarks and torture tests, we
soon realized that the X850XTPE weakness is it's cooling system.
While the cooler looks tough and bulky, it just isn't keeping the
card cool. This was evident as on the second hour of testing we
started to see artifacts on the screen. Even with the side cover
off the test box, the cooler was unable to keep up.
To verify the integrity of the cooling system, we removed it to
ensure the heatsink was actually coming into full contact with the
GPU. Once the cooler was off, we could clearly see that the one
corner of the GPU
was not coming into full contact with the heatsink and there
appeared to be entirely too much thermal grease on the core. We
cleaned up the GPU and heatsink, reapplied silver based thermal
grease, and carefully reinstalled the cooling system. We retested the video
card and this time the card was far more stable and the artifacts
were gone. Problem solved, but I still feel that the cooling system
could be a little better.
Next up,
overclocking!
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