Testbed and Methods

We performed our tests on a testbed configured like follows:

• AMD Athlon 64 4000+ CPU (2.40GHz, 1MB L2 cache);
• ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe mainboard;
• 2 x 512MB OCZ PC-3200 Platinum EB DDR SDRAM (CL2.5-3-2-8);
• Samsung SpinPoint SP1213C hard disk drive (Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer);
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card.

Since we didn’t have a sample of the GeForce 6800 for PCI Express in our labs at the time of our tests, we benchmarked it on our AGP platform (these results are marked with an asterisk (*) in the diagrams):

• AMD Athlon 64 4000+ CPU (2.40GHz, 1MB L2 cache);
• ABIT KV8 Pro mainboard;
• 2x 512MB OCZ PC-3200 Platinum EB DDR SDRAM (CL2.5-3-2-8);
• Samsung SpinPoint SP1213C hard disk drive (Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer);
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card.

Software:

• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2, DirectX 9.0c;
• ATI Catalyst 5.2;
• NVIDIA ForceWare 66.93.

Besides the Leadtek WinFast PX6600 GT TDH, we included the following cards into this review for the comparison’s sake:

PCI Express hardware

• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT 256MB (350/1000MHz);

• ATI RADEON X800 XL 256MB (400/1000MHz);
• ATI RADEON X700 XT 256MB (475/1000MHz)
  for details see our article called ATI RADEON X700 XT: Architecture Preview;
• ATI RADEON X700 PRO 256 MB (420/864MHz);

AGP hardware

• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 128MB (325/700MHz).

The Catalyst A.I. option was set to “Standard? and the Mipmap Detail Level option to “Quality?in ATI’s Catalyst driver. We also enabled the ForceWare optimizations save for the Anisotropic mip filter optimization. We used the Quality mode for Image Settings. We disabled VSync in the drivers for all the participating cards.

We turned on full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering from the game’s own menu. Otherwise we forced the necessary mode from the driver. The maximum graphics quality settings were selected in each game, the same for graphics cards on ATI’s and NVIDIA’s GPUs.

We used the following games and benchmarks for this review:

First Person 3D Shooters:

• Doom III;
• Unreal Tournament 2004;
• The Chronicles of Riddick;
• Far Cry;
• Painkiller: Battle Out of Hell;
• Half-Life 2;

Third Person 3D Shooters:

• Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow;
• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within;

Simulators:

• IL-2 Sturmovik: Aces in the Sky;
• Lock On: Modern Air Combat;
• Colin McRae Rally 2005;

Strategies:

• Warhammer 40.000: Dawn of War;
• Perimeter;

Semi-Synthetic Benchmarks:

• Aquamark3;
• Final Fantasy;

Synthetic Benchmarks:

• Futuremark 3DMark03 build 360;
• Futuremark 3DMark05 build 120.