At ClubOC we strive to give you the most accurate benchmarks. We also try and get the most aggressive hardware and BIOS settings in order to cancel out any argument that we might have a bottleneck that may render our testing invalid for those out there with fast systems. We also have a special treat, seeing as how we finally received a nVentive Mach I for cooling our AMD system. Hopefully the outdated AMD 32bit platform isn't too outdated to give us some nice scores on the benchmarks we've chosen to run. I would also like to note that we used Rage 3D Tweak for manipulating the default clock speeds on our R9800, but all benchmarks used the latest catalyst 4.2 drivers on default settings, so our scores may differ from that of other hardware sites. Due to the -30C cooling we used AS Ceramic on our mobile 2400, and AS 3 on our overclocking tests on the GPU in conjunction with Danger Den's Maze 4 GPU water block. Our platform is as follows...

AMD Athlon XP2400 Mobile@2813
DFI Infinity Ultra Revision A
nVentive Mach I phase change for CPU
Danger Den Maze 4 GPU water block
Eheim 1250 Pump
Mushkin LVL 2 2x512mb PC3500
Enermax 465VE 430W PSU
Mylex SCSI RAID 0+3 w/ Seagate Cheetah 3x36gb 15k drives

FIC Radeon 9800 128mb w/ stock cooling unless otherwise noted
PNY FX5900 128mb w/ stock cooling unless otherwise noted

Synthetic Benchmark

3DMark 2001

     Notice how the Radeon 9800 Pro dominates this benchmark over the FX5900. Proving that when it comes to synthetic benchmarks the 9800 gives you bragging rights. Also notice that the FX runs out of steam on the high resolution tests especially with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing enabled.

Gaming Benchmarks

Call of Duty

     With AA and AF disabled the 9800 walks the FX. Oddly enough, the FX does quite well against the 9800 in the AF and AA tests, but as not noted on the chart the FX goes into <30fps during hard game play unlike the 9800 which stays above a playable 30fps. This is somewhat important considering that Call Of Duty has such a mature Q3 engine.

Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby

     The FX beats the 9800 in out UT Flyby test, but both cards are pretty even. We had problems getting AA and AF to function consistently on both cards in UT2003 so we left those tests alone.

Unreal Tournament 2003 Botmatch

     Once again both cards are neck and neck.. This is rather surprising, since the 9800 clearly has an advantage in the synthetic benchmark, and has less frame rate drop. Perhaps its time for ClubOC to record and develop its own methodology for dropped frames, because after spending a little time with the 9800, it is clearly a superior card in overall performance compared to the FX.

Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo

     Here's our answer as to why the 9800 feels more powerful. The FIC stomps the FX in this benchmark! This is a clear indication of why so many enthusiasts chose an ATI card over the NVIDIA rival...Because it can play future games.