µATX Part 1: ATI Radeon Xpress 1250 Performance Review
by Gary Key on August 28, 2007 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Test Setup
We selected the Intel E2160 Core 2 Duo processor as our main choice for the Intel platform boards since it represents a great bargain when comparing price against performance in the low end of the market where we will concentrate our uATX review efforts. We also switched to Microsoft Vista Home Premium 32-bit as our operating system of choice for this category. After speaking with several of the larger OEMs, we found out this OS choice is the one most widely offered to consumers. It was a natural then that we would test on Vista Home Premium with a 4GB memory configuration due to rapidly falling memory prices. Even though Vista 32-bit cannot take advantage of the entire 4GB of memory address space, we found the additional 1.2GB (on average) of memory available provided improved performance during multitasking events and gaming. We would not recommend anything less than 2GB with Vista Home Premium.
Our hard drive choice is a little out of the norm but since we will be testing the multimedia capabilities of our boards in an HTPC article we felt like the PVR designed drive would be a natural fit. Our OCZ memory choice was determined based upon a combination of price and performance levels that will be required during the overclocking testing with the higher end G33 boards. We did test each board with a wide variety of budget DDR2-800 memory from several suppliers that will be listed in our compatibility charts at the end of this article series. Our boards were set to utilize 256MB of memory for the IGP solution. The ASRock board supported up to 512MB of shared memory but all of the test results were the same so we left the setting at 256MB.
We will also present GPU comparison testing using external video cards from AMD and NVIDIA. Our results today will include video and gaming performance results with the AMD HD 2600 XT from Gigabyte and NVIDIA 8600 GTS card from Galaxy. All other components in our test configurations are identical with the boards being set up in their default configurations except for memory settings being optimized to ensure maximum throughput on each board. We will cover image quality analysis, audio, installation, and peripheral components in detail in separate articles.
Our choice of software applications to test is based on programs that enjoy widespread use and produce repeatable and consistent results during testing. Microsoft Vista has thrown a monkey wrench into testing as the aggressive nature of the operating system to constantly optimize application loading and retrieval from memory or the storage system presents some interesting obstacles. This along with the lack of driver maturity will continue to present problems in the near future with benchmark selections.
Our normal process is to change our power settings to performance, delete the contents of the prefetch folder, and then reboot after each benchmark run. This is a lengthy process but it results in consistency over the course of benchmark testing. All applications are run with administer privileges.
| abit Fatality F-I90HD / ASRock 4Core1333-FullHD Testbed | |
| Processor | Intel Pentium (Core 2 Based) E2160 Dual Core, 1.8GHz, 1MB Unified Cache, 9x Multiplier, 800FSB |
| CPU Voltage | 1.3250V |
| Cooling | Scythe Ninja Mini |
| Power Supply | SeaSonic S-12 II 480W |
| Memory | OCZ HPC Reaper PC2-6400 (4x1GB) |
| Memory Settings | 4-4-4-12 (2.00V abit/2.04V ASRock) |
| Video Cards | On-Board X1250, Gigabyte HD 2600XT, Galaxy 8600GTS HDMI |
| Video Drivers | AMD 7.8, NVIDIA 163.44 |
| Hard Drive | Seagate DB35.3 7200RPM 750GB SATA 3/Gbps 16MB Buffer Western Digital 74GB 10, 000RPM SATA 16MB Buffer (2 for RAID testing) |
| Optical Drives | Plextor PX-B900A, Toshiba SD-H802A, Pioneer BDC-S02BK |
| Audio Card | Realtek ALC-888, ASUS Xonar D2 |
| Audio Drivers | Realtek 1.73, ASUS 5.12.01.0008.17.19 |
| Audio Test Equipment | Swans M10 (2.1), Swans D1080 (2.0), Acculine A2 (5.1) Onkyo TX-SR605 A/V Receiver |
| Case | Zalman HD160XT |
| BIOS | abit 1.4, ASRock 1.30C |
| Operating System | Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit |
| . | |
| MSI G33M Testbed | |
| Processor | Intel Pentium (Core 2 Based) E2160 Dual Core, 1.8GHz, 1MB Unified Cache, 9x Multiplier, 800FSB |
| CPU Voltage | 1.3250V |
| Cooling | Scythe Ninja Mini |
| Power Supply | SeaSonic S-12 II 480W |
| Memory | OCZ HPC Reaper PC2-6400 (4x1GB) |
| Memory Settings | 5-5-5-12 (2.0V) |
| Video Cards | On-board GMA3100, Gigabyte HD 2600XT, Galaxy 8600GTS HDMI |
| Video Drivers | Intel 15.4, AMD 7.8, NVIDIA 163.44 |
| Hard Drive | Seagate DB35.3 7200RPM 750GB SATA 3/Gbps 16MB Buffer |
| Optical Drives | Plextor PX-B900A, Toshiba SD-H802A, Pioneer BDC-S02BK |
| Audio Card | Realtek ALC-888, ASUS Xonar D2 |
| Audio Drivers | Realtek 1.73, ASUS 5.12.01.0008.17.19 |
| Audio Test Equipment | Swans M10 (2.1), Swans D1080 (2.0), Acculine A2 (5.1) Onkyo TX-SR605 A/V Receiver |
| Case | Zalman HD160XT |
| BIOS | v1.00 |
| Operating System | Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit |
| . | |
We selected the Intel E2160 Core 2 Duo processor as our main choice for the Intel platform boards since it represents a great bargain when comparing price against performance in the low end of the market where we will concentrate our uATX review efforts. We also switched to Microsoft Vista Home Premium 32-bit as our operating system of choice for this category. After speaking with several of the larger OEMs, we found out this OS choice is the one most widely offered to consumers. It was a natural then that we would test on Vista Home Premium with a 4GB memory configuration due to rapidly falling memory prices. Even though Vista 32-bit cannot take advantage of the entire 4GB of memory address space, we found the additional 1.2GB (on average) of memory available provided improved performance during multitasking events and gaming. We would not recommend anything less than 2GB with Vista Home Premium.
Our hard drive choice is a little out of the norm but since we will be testing the multimedia capabilities of our boards in an HTPC article we felt like the PVR designed drive would be a natural fit. Our OCZ memory choice was determined based upon a combination of price and performance levels that will be required during the overclocking testing with the higher end G33 boards. We did test each board with a wide variety of budget DDR2-800 memory from several suppliers that will be listed in our compatibility charts at the end of this article series. Our boards were set to utilize 256MB of memory for the IGP solution. The ASRock board supported up to 512MB of shared memory but all of the test results were the same so we left the setting at 256MB.
We will also present GPU comparison testing using external video cards from AMD and NVIDIA. Our results today will include video and gaming performance results with the AMD HD 2600 XT from Gigabyte and NVIDIA 8600 GTS card from Galaxy. All other components in our test configurations are identical with the boards being set up in their default configurations except for memory settings being optimized to ensure maximum throughput on each board. We will cover image quality analysis, audio, installation, and peripheral components in detail in separate articles.
Our choice of software applications to test is based on programs that enjoy widespread use and produce repeatable and consistent results during testing. Microsoft Vista has thrown a monkey wrench into testing as the aggressive nature of the operating system to constantly optimize application loading and retrieval from memory or the storage system presents some interesting obstacles. This along with the lack of driver maturity will continue to present problems in the near future with benchmark selections.
Our normal process is to change our power settings to performance, delete the contents of the prefetch folder, and then reboot after each benchmark run. This is a lengthy process but it results in consistency over the course of benchmark testing. All applications are run with administer privileges.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
22 Comments
View All Comments
Griswold - Wednesday, August 29, 2007 - link
There are a couple SM2.0 patch projects for bioshock out there. Google for it.mostlyprudent - Tuesday, August 28, 2007 - link
I am looking forward to the rest of the series.