Test Setup

Athlon 3000+ (Winchester Core) @ 2461 Mhz (273.5 Mhz FSB)
Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI (nForce 4 SLI chipset)
OCZ Platinum Edition PC4200 2*512MB Dual Channel Memory Kit
OCZ Modstream 520W Powersupply
NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT SLI
NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT
ATI RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition
Gigabyte 3D1 (6600GT SLI)
NVIDIA Reference 6600GT
Western Digital WD1200 SATA HD
Windows XP SP2
DirectX 9c

Because we are finding it hard to justify forking out over a grand in Canadian dollars for a Athlon FX chip, we decided the next best thing to do was to spend mere pennies and get a 90nm Winchester core based Athlon 3000+. Actually it was a bit more than that but seeing as how we can get six of these as opposed to a single Athlon FX it seemed like the wiser decision especially since these things can overclock fairly well. From the slightly pokey default 1800 Mhz we managed to squeeze 2461 out of the chip which is certainly in the clock speed range of the Athlon FX. Again we will stress that end users who are looking at a SLI solution should look to mating it with a fast processor as the CPU will become the bottleneck.

Drivers consisted of the official 4.12s from ATI which seem to be a more recent build than the RC2 drivers provided for the X850 XT PE Launch. Drivers on the NVIDIA side are the 71.24s provided by Gigabyte and the same set was used in testing across all the NVIDIA cards.

For both the X850 XT PE and the 6800GT SLI set up we ran an additional set of benchmarks labeled as custom - ATI went with a 6x AA setting while NVIDIA has gone with something they call 8xS which is a combination of multisampling and supersampling. Both ATI and NVIDIA currently use a multisample technique which has been in place since the introduction of the GeForce 3. Supersampling was the classic brute force method of antialiasing where a higher than displayed resolution was rendered then subsequently scaled down. Because of the performance hit involved, it is not a technique that is normally used. Because of the different supported antialiasing settings and techniques, the benchmark set labeled CUSTOM is not directly comparable between the ATI and NVIDIA solutions.

Benchmarks

• 3DMark 2005
• Aquamark 3
• Call of Duty
• Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Academy
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• Halo
• X2 Rolling demo
• Splinter Cell
• Doom 3
• Half-life 2