Test Setup & Benchmarks

We build our test setup with the help of Tones.be (Belgian’s Largest Hardware Shop!) who helped us with the hard drives, CPUs and monitors, MSI for the motherboards, OCZ for the memory, Coolermaster for the cases and power supplies and last but not least, Scythe for the silent CPU coolers.

We aim to build a VGA test setup we can keep using for some time to come. To be able to have some performance numbers for our readers today we quickly configured the system with the parts we had at hand.

Intel Test Setup
CPU	Intel Core 2 E8200 @ 2.66Ghz
Cooling	Scythe Ninja 2
Mainboard	MSI P45 Platinum
Memory	2 * OCZ 1Gb PC2-6400
Other	Coolermaster CM690 Enclosure (3*120mm case fans) Coolermaster UCP 900W Power Supply Western Digital 80Gb HDD (system) Samsung 640Gb HDD (Data)

At the time of writing the system we build would cost you approximately ~€1200 without the VGA card. While it’s not a budget system, it’s also far from high end as we’re using a DDR2 motherboard and a mid-range Wolfdale CPU. Combining it with a €300+ VGA card does place it in the more expensive bracket when it comes down to building a game machine.

One of the costs for a system is the monitor for sure, the system price mentioned above includes this screen, a SAMSUNG Syncmaster 2493HM 24inch, it has a native resolution of 1920x1200 this screen offers quite low 5ms latency. Again this screen is mid-range as more expensive models are available, but the resolution of most 26”~27” screens remains the same at 1920x1200 resolution. You need to invest into a 30” to go higher to 2560x1600 at which point you will be spending a pretty hefty sum.

The latest official Forceware drivers were used. There are some PhysX enabled beta drivers available for NVIDIA cards which enables PhysX acceleration in games using this technology. Upcoming games in the future will provide a noticeable difference, for now you need special maps (UT3) or special games (Cellshock) in order to see the PhysX effects.

ATI Catalyst drivers used are 8.52.2 which will be known later on as the Catalyst 8.8.

We used a clean install of Windows XP with SP3. Vista benchmark results will be added at a later date.

OS: Windows XP SP3

NVIDIA Drivers: Forceware 177.41

ATI Drivers: Catalyst 8.8 (8.52.2)

In our tests today we aim to find out how the ATI HD4870X2 and Geforce GTX 280 perform at 1920x1200 for those with 24~ 27” screens as well as 1600x1200 for the owners of the now very affordable 20~22” monitors.

If you are looking to buy a top end graphics card, chances are you don’t want to settle for anything less than the highest detail in-game. All the games we tested have the highest quality settings enabled in-game for textures and world-detail. The Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering was changed depending on the game, for these settings please see the detailed results chart on the following pages.

These are the games we tested:

Crysis (HardwareOC – Custom Benchmark)

Quake 4 (Manual FRAPS)

Unreal Tournament 3 (Manual FRAPS)

World in Conflict (Build-in Benchmark)

Race Driver:GRID (Manual FRAPS)

Supreme Commander Forged Alliance (Build-in Benchmark)

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Manual FRAPS)

Trackmania Nations (Build-in Benchmark)

In the future we’ll add more game tests for now this performance test with the games listed above should give you an idea of what the expect.