HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested the Albatron PC6600U on an Intel D915PBL motherboard (i915P) fueled by a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 550 and 1GB of Corsair XMS2 Pro DDR2 memory. The first thing we did when configuring this test system was enter the BIOS and loaded the "Optimal Performance Settings." We left the memory timings set by SPD. The Seagate SATA hard drive we used was formatted, and Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed the latest Intel chipset drivers. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers for the rest of our components and removed Windows Messenger from the system.  Auto-Updating, System Restore, and Drive Indexing were disabled, the hard drive was defragmented, and a 1536 MB permanent page file was created on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed the benchmarking software, and ran all of the tests.

The We Test System Finally, we've got a new toy to play with

Performance Comparisons With 3DMark05 Futuremark's Latest...but is it the greatest?

3DMark05

3DMark05 is the latest installment in a long line of synthetic 3D graphics benchmarks, dating back to late 1998.  3DMark99 came out in October 1998, and was followed by the very popular DirectX 7 benchmark, 3DMark2000, roughly two years later.  The DirectX 8.1 compliant 3DMark2001 was released shortly thereafter, and it too was a very popular tool used by many hardcore gamers.  3DMark03, however, wasn't quite as well received thanks in no small part to the disapproval of graphics giant NVIDIA.  With 3DMark05 though, Futuremark hopes to win back some of their audience, with a very advanced DirectX 9 benchmarking tool.  We ran 3DMark05's default test (1024x768) on all of the cards we tested and have the overall results for you posted below...

We began our testing by pitting the Albatron PC6600U against two of it's main competitors, the similarly priced ATi Radeon X700 Pro and the more recent Radeon X800XL, which has a more powerful 16-pipe GPU and should be priced about $100 more (US), while not hitting the full price point of some of the higher end cards.  Initial takes on performance using 3DMark05 show the PC6600U running at similar levels to the X700 Pro.  These two cards, however, are completely overwhelmed by the X800XL, which nearly doubled their output.

Performance Comparisons With Final Fantasy XI Benchmark 3 A Classic Console Franchise On The PC

Final Fantasy XI

The Final Fantasy franchise is well known to console gamers, but Squaresoft has since made the jump to the PC with a MMORPG version of this classic. The Final Fantasy XI benchmark runs through multiple scenes from the game and displays a final score every time a full cycle of the demo is completed. Although the demo is meant to check an entire system's readiness to play the game, the number of frames rendered scales when different video cards are used. Lower scores indicate some frames were dropped to complete the demo in the allotted time. The scores below were taken with the demo set to its "High Resolution" option (1024x768) with anti-aliasing disabled.

The Final Fantasy XI Benchmark was a bit more forgiving, if you will, although the PC6600U still placed a distant last to the Radeons.  While the X700 Pro made up some ground on the X800XL, the PC6600U was close to 18% slower than the X700 and almost 31% than the X800.