Powercolor X1900 GT Crossfire Review - PAGE 3

Test Setup

Due to the fact that the performance of the X1900 GT is already well publicized, we're focusing primarly on the bandwidth as it relates to Crossfire so our limited benchmarking suite focuses on these two cards in Crossfire relative to the direct competition which comes in the form of two 7900 GT's in SLI.

Our graphs show four numbers in total, and if you've read through our X1800 GTO Crossfire article, you'll be familiar with what each of the three X1900 GT numbers represent. The two cableless setups are just that, two X1900 GT's run in Crossfire without the cable and master card, thanks to the recent Catalyst 6.7 drivers. We test the two cards with both 16x bandwidth per PCI-E slot and 8x. This simulates the two different variations of Crossfire motherboards available and will give an idea of what sort of performance to expect based on what chipset your motherboard sports. Any motherboard based on the Xpress 200 Northbridge will only give 8x bandwidth to each graphics card versus an RD580 or Xpress 3200 which will feed each card the full 16 lanes of bandwidth. The third X1900 GT setup we used was with one of our Powercolor X1900 GT's cabled to an X1900 XT Crossfire master card with each PCI-E slot set at 16x. For the uninitiated, when paired with an X1900 GT, the mastercard will disable 4 of its pipes and lower its clocks to match those of the slower card.

We used two different setups for testing due to the requirement of an ATI chipped motherboard for Crossfire testing.

• AMD Athlon 64 3700+ processor @ 2.7 GHz (300 MHz * 9)
• ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe motherboard
• 2*512 MB OCZ PC4800 Platinum Edition memory (2.5-4-4-8 1T, 300 MHz)
• Western Digital WD1200JD SATA hard drive
• OCZ GameXstream 700W PSU
• ATI Catalyst 6.7 Drivers

• AMD Athlon 64 3700+ processor @ 2.7 GHz (300 MHz * 9)
• DFI LanParty NF4 SLI-DR motherboard
• 2*512 MB OCZ PC4800 Platinum Edition memory (2.5-4-4-8 1T, 300 MHz)
• Western Digital WD1200JD SATA hard drive
• OCZ GameXstream 700W PSU
• NVIDIA Forceware 81.98 Drivers

The list of benchmarks performed is as follows:

• 3DMark 2006 Feature Tests
• Call of Duty 2
• Doom 3
• Far Cry
• F.E.A.R.
• Half-Life 2
• Serious Sam 2 Demo
• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory