New Hardware Deserves a good Benchmark.
I had finally gotten myself some new hardware, just in time for Christmas and I decided that there is only one thing to do after you have received new stuff, test it!
My old system:
I didn't go for the whole nine yards, with this upgrade I simply got myself something to get me into the first part of the new year. My previous system was descent to say the least and it did it's job great. I was able to play all games at descent resolutions and quality, it was based on NVidia's Nforce 3 architecture by epox, had a AMD Athlon64 3200+ s939 cpu and a geforce 6600 vanilla gpu a 160gb seagate baracuda S-ATA hard disk and 2X512mb samsung memory modules. As you will notice my new system isn't really that big of an upgrade.
My new stuff:
This time around I decided to get a system built around products from Asus. I chose Asus not because i didn't like Epox, in fact i liked epox, from my first system up to my last I used Epox main boards and mostly oem graphics. It was just that Epox had given my a very reliable and cost effective base, but it was time to move along! Why Asus, well not considering the 3 year warranty, Asus have proved them selfs over and over again as a well established brand, a very good performer and overall very reliable.
The mainboard:
The Asus A8N-SLI Premium is a very nice looking board, with sleek black and white brings which adds a classical and classy touch. This board is loaded, it has all the bells and whistles of the Nforce4 sli platform and some nice others. It has dual gigabit lan which includes the nvidia phy and hardware firewall. Realtek ALC850 8 channel audio. Some Asus addons are the nice heat pipe, which most people familiar with the previous Sli offering from Asus would know, is far better than the screaming small fan! Nice overclocking features, AI NOS™ which is said to boost performance on the fly when you demand it, here is the description from the Asus website:
“Boost performance when you need it the most!
Applications such as 3D games and video editing demand a huge chunk of system resource.
Inject "nitrous oxide" into your CPU! The patented AI NOS™ (Non-delay Overclocking System) technology intelligently detects system load and automatically boosts performance for the most demanding tasks. Unlike other dynamic overclocking techniques, AI NOS™ reacts much faster to satisfy your unending need for speeds.”
It also supports raid 0,1 0+1 and JBOD.
The main thing is probably that this is and SLI capable board. For those that are not familiar with Scalable Link Interface(SLI), here is the meat, SLI is a revolutionary technology by Nvidia, it allows you to connect 2 high end graphics cards in a single system to scale performance. It runs on the pci express bus allowing for more bandwidth than the traditional agp bus. For SLI to work you have to have 2 identical Nvidia SLI capable graphics cards and when I say identical I mean it, for example 2 Asus 6800 cards, not one Asus and one Gainward, or one 6800 and one 6600GT! For a more in depth look into SLI visit www.nvidia.com.
The rest of the system:
Seeing as I now had a Nforce4 system which had no agp but instead Pci-e i needed a new graphics card. I wanted to get the 6800GS the new high performing 6 series GPU from Nvidia, but I rather went for the 6600 silencer from Asus. Why, well frankly I don't really know! I didn't want to spend to much money as I would be getting a big upgrade middle 2006, the 6600GT was not in stock at most distributors, it was Christmas soon and most distributors didn't buy new stock for year end.
First of this card looked very nice it only had a large heatsink no fan! As the silnecer in the title suggests
this card has no moving parts to generate noise. I was a bit skeptic at first if this card would perform as well as normal 6600 cards and if it would be underclocked, to ensure that over heating never occurred.
But when i really started to push it, it would proof to be quite the performer!
The new hard drive was a larger capacity 250Gb drive also from seagate.
On to the Benchmark:
I started out with Quake 4 seeing that it is a new popular title and it used the doom3 engine, which had provided easy and reliable benchmarking in the past. I used a custom made demo from the beginning of the game and one I got from the Internet: http://www.filecloud.com/files/file.php?user_file_id=69660. At stock frequencies the card was clocked at 300MHz GPU and 500MHz for memory, during various stages I overclocked the card more until I reached a max, were I started to either notice artifacts or the driver didn't allow me to use the settings.
The card "maxed out" at 430MHz Core/GPU and 550MHz Memory frequencies, very impressive if you consider that at stock it was clocked at 300MHz and 500MHz! A 130MHz overclock on core frequency!
The following are links to screen shots taken trough out the benchmarking process.
First Benchmark Overclocked at 340MHz Case open.
Second Stage Overclocked at 380MHz Case closed Tempretures lower!
Third Stage Overclocked at 390MHz
Stage Four Overclocked at 400MHz!
Stage five Overclocked at 420MHz!
Final Stage Max Overclock at 430MHz!
Demo 4 results Overclocked at 400MHz
Demo 4 results Overclocked at 420MHz