You Think Hard Drive Speed Doesn’t Matter? by John Reynolds Introduction Western Digital introduced the first Raptor® hard drive almost five years ago, a 37 GB unit that was the first desktop ATA drive to offer 10K RPM spindle speeds. Since then Western Digital has been improving the Raptor family across multiple generations, releasing a […]
Conclusions With Service Pack 1 for Vista now available, AMD has been touting their DX10.1 support. The new shader model makes a few features mandatory, such as 32-bit texture filtering, but it’s anyone’s guess how broad the developer support will be and in this writer’s opinion SM1.4 comes to mind, a minor DX revision that […]
Rainbow Six: Vegas 2’s in-game options were configured at high and quality level 2 chosen for its anti-aliasing setting. FRAPS was used to record the frame rate via run-throughs of the Terrorist Hunt game mode on the Villa map. The Radeon 3870 pulls out a narrow margin in this newest Rainbow Six title, squeaking past the […]
Test Results Futuremark’s synthetic graphics suite, 3DMark06, was run at 1280×1024, its default resolution, with 4x anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled to produce a total score. Radeon 3850 Radeon 3870 GeForce 9600 GT Total 6472 7414 7621 The GeForce 9600 GT barely squeaks out a win against the Radeon 3870, beating the AMD part by just […]
by John Reynolds Introduction High-end graphics boards have become one of the most sought after components inside a PC enthusiast’s gaming machine, but also one of the most expensive. The GTX, Ultra, or XTX nomenclatures of the graphics market go after the halo effect of the performance crown, which is the general perception that any […]
Back To Page 2 GTR2 was tested with a custom recording of a crowded grand prix track. The title’s configuration tool was used to enable its DX9 profile. The title’s video options were set at full for the high category testing since GTR2 isn’t particularly demanding. GTR2 sees in the low category a strong differentiation […]
Back To Page 1 Test Results – Synthetic PCMark05, like all of Futuremark’s benchmark suites, is made up of a series of tests designed to stress specific subsystems, such as hard drive, processor, or memory performance. SimHQ decided to use just the CPU suite and the total score for this article. X2 4850E X3 […]
by John Reynolds Introduction As is well known by now, the list of improvements AMD made to their micro architecture going from Athlon to Phenom was not as impressive as Intel’s updates moving from NetBurst to Core. AMD parts also currently lag a generation behind Intel’s on the fabrication process front and despite being “true” […]
Back To Page 2 The final benchmark was on my favorite first-person game of all time: Armed Assault. The new computer gave me a great excuse to get ArmA patched up to the most recent build, hop on the SimHQ server and TeamSpeak, and GET TACTICAL DAMMIT! I had forgotten how much fun ArmA is, […]
Back To Page 1 Next up was X-Plane 8.64, one of my favorite sims. The 6800GT in the old system held its own against the new system at lower detail levels, but where the 9800 GX2 shines is when you start upping the graphics (and resolution) while the FPS stay very high. It was interesting to […]
by Chris “BeachAV8R” Frishmuth Now that we’ve built the new system, let’s take a look at how she performs. I did some comparative benchmarks between my old system and my new one. All benchmarks were measured by FRAPs at 1680 x 1050 resolution. OLD SYSTEM NEW SYSTEM Intel Pentium 4 3.4 GHz Intel Core […]
by Chris “BeachAV8R” Frishmuth Introduction About three years ago, much to the dismay of my friends here at SimHQ, I purchased a new computer from Alienware. Experienced users ribbed me for taking the lazy way out and pointed out that I had probably spent 1/3 or more on the same computer I could have […]
