GeForce 9800 GX2 vs 8800 GTS SLI vs 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 Benchmark

GeForce 9800 GX2 vs 8800 GTS SLI vs 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 Benchmark

From rumors to leaked photos to simulated benchmarks, 9800GX2 are all over the web. Anyhow, the highlight of today's review is about the 174.53 driver. We shall find out how GX2 would perform against the 8800GTS SLI, HD 3870 X2 and the G80 8800 Ultra.

The 174.53 Vista 32-bit can be downloaded HERE.





Test Platform

• Core 2 Duo E8500 @ 3.16GHz
• EVGA nForce 780i SLI
• 2x 1GB Corsair TWIN2X2048-8500C5D 5-5-5-18
  
• Western Digital Caviar SE 320GB SATA320
  
• Silverstone Olympus 1200 W
• Fujitsu-Siemens Scenicview P24 (1920x1200)

• Asus GeForce 9800 GX2 (600/900 MHz)
• EVGA GeForce 8800 Ultra (612/1080 MHz)
• EVGA & MSI GeForce 8800 GTS 512 MB (650/970 MHz)
• AMD Radeon HD 3870 X2 (825/900 MHz)

• Windows Vista 32-bit
• NVIDIA ForceWare 174.53 (for 9800GX2)
  
• NVIDIA ForceWare 169.25
• AMD Catalyst 8.3
• 3DMark06 v1.1.0
• Bioshock 1.1
• Call of Duty 4 demo
• Crysis v1.2.1
• Need for Speed: ProStreet demo
• Unreal Tournament 3 demo

Compiled Test Result


(click to enlarge)

Results shown are average frame rates measured using FRAPS.




Power Consumption, Temperature & Noise Level


(click to enlarge)

Load power consumption & temperature were measured during 3DMark06's Canyon Flight. While noise level was taken using the Welleman DVM805 at a distance of 50cm.


Source: http://plaza.fi/muropaketti/artikkelit/naytonohjaimet/nvidia-geforce-9800-gx2,3


Other popular posts:

• GeForce 9800GTX Review
  
• AMD B3 Phenom X4 9850 Benchmarked
• Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 vs AMD Radeon HD 3870 X2
• GeForce 9600 GT vs Radeon HD 3850
• Crysis Patch 1.2 Download
• Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 Benchmark & Review
• AMD Phenom Benchmark: Triple Core 8600 vs Quad Core 9600
• Radeon HD 3870X2 vs GeForce 8800 Ultra
• Core 2 Quad Q9300 vs Q6600
• AMD Dual-Core Sempron
• nVidia GeForce 9600GT Benchmark Result

Offensive Bimbo game angers parents

A new web-based game, Miss Bimbo, is angering parents. It is apparently teaching young women that diets, plastic surgery & breast enhancement surgery are necessary tools for achieving happiness in life.

The purpose of Miss Bimbo is for players to create a virtual "bimbo", help her maintain an ideal appearance (with the help of diet pills and plastic surgery), then buy her presents and send her out partying in order to compete with other players.

That's enough to push Miss Bimbo into "extremely offensive" territory. When players run out of "Bimbo Dollars" (used to purchase items and accomplish tasks like going to the game's plastic surgery clinic for breast enhancement surgery), the game apparently requires them to either send £1.50 text messages—or send cash via PayPal—in order to replenish the in-game funds. Last year, a man in France threatened to sue the developers when he discovered his daughter has racked up roughly $200 in phone charges by sending a number of the pricey text messages in order to increase her character's resources.

In spite of this dubious business practice, it's one that's obviously successful: the French game has over 1.2 million members, and the UK version has attracted over 200,000 players so far...

Full article here: http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2008/03/28/how-to-anger-women-101

AMD B3 Phenom X4 9850 benchmarked Part3

Part 1: Introduction, Overclocking & Test Platform
Part 2: Benchmarks
Part 3: Gaming & Power Consumption

Continued from Part 2...


Gaming Performance



Looks like Intel processors can handle the load better than AMD.





Nothing much to say about Oblivion, since the writer picked a GPU-limited scene for the benchmark.




Can you see a pattern in these 3 game benchmarks?
The dual-cores are leading all the way!




Sadly, even in this quad-core optimized game, the Phenoms are slower than any of its competitors here.



Power Consumption:



Thanks to Intel's 45nm process, Q9300 managed to save 20W+ over Q6600 in idle.




The load power consumption of Q9300 is really impressive! The new Phenoms are power hungry monsters.



Part 1: Introduction, Overclocking & Test Platform
Part 2: Benchmarks
Part 3: Gaming & Power Consumption


Highlights:
AMD Phenom X3 8600 vs X4 9600
AMD B3 Phenom X4 9850
Core 2 Quad Q9300 vs Q6600



Source: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3272

AMD B3 Phenom X4 9850 benchmarked Part2

Part 1: Introduction, Overclocking & Test Platform
Part 2: Benchmarks
Part 3: Gaming & Power Consumption

Continued from Part 1...


Test Results



The slowest Core2Quad managed to hold a 7% lead over the fastest Phenom. But of course the latter is priced lower.




The same 7% lead was seen again in 3dsmax.




This time the same gap widens to 25% in POV-Ray.




Things turned around when it comes to AutoMKV encoding, the 9850 is actually slightly faster than the Q6600.




Not mentioning the 45nm Q9300, no Phenoms came even close to Q6600.





Even the dual-core Wolf looks threatening to the quad-core Phenoms.





DivX performance favors the Core architecture. Even the good old E6750 beats the fastest Phenom here.






No doubt, Intel quad cores are still in the lead.




Finally, the Phenom X4 9850 managed to catch up with the Q6600


Next Page

Part 1: Introduction, Overclocking & Test Platform
Part 2: Benchmarks
Part 3: Gaming & Power Consumption

AMD B3 Phenom X4 9850 benchmarked Part1

AMD Phenom is back with not 1, not 2, not 3, but 7 fresh from the oven models. The infamous TLB bug gone, and the B3s are renamed as 9x50. In this extract of the article from Anandtech, we shall see how they perform against Intel's offerings as well as their B2 siblings.

	Cores	Stepping	Clock Speed	TDP	L2 Cache	L3 Cache	1 Ku Price
AMD Phenom X4 9850	4	B3	2.5GHz	125W	2MB	2MB	$235
AMD Phenom X4 9750	4	B3	2.4GHz	125W	2MB	2MB	$215
AMD Phenom X4 9750*	4	B3	2.4GHz	95W	2MB	2MB	$???
AMD Phenom X4 9650*	4	B3	2.3GHz	95W	2MB	2MB	$???
AMD Phenom X4 9550	4	B3	2.2GHz	95W	2MB	2MB	$195
AMD Phenom X4 9100e*	4	B2	1.8GHz	65W	2MB	2MB	~$200
AMD Phenom X3 8600*	3	B2	2.3GHz	95W	1.5MB	2MB	~$175
AMD Phenom X3 8400*	3	B2	2.1GHz	95W	1.5MB	2MB	~$150

*OEM only

Phenom X4 9850



The 9850, being the top of the line B3 Phenoms, is a "Black Edition" part, meaning it has an unlocked multiplier. It is also the first AMD processor to have its L3/Northbridge/Memory Controller running at 2.0Ghz.



Overclocking:



Overclocking wise, it was slightly better than any previous attempts, it managed to stabilize @ 2.8Ghz with a voltage boost.



Performance Impact of the TLB Bug

	SYSMark 2007	DivX	CineBench R10	3dsmax 9	WinRAR
AMD Phenom 9600 (B2 Stepping) - TLB Fix Disabled	117	74.3 fps	7396	7.20	1348 KB/s
AMD Phenom 9600 (B2 Stepping) - TLB Fix Enabled	105	72.0 fps	7031	6.47	367 KB/s
Performance Impact	-10.3%	-3.1%	-4.9%	-10.1%	-72.8%

As you can see, there are loss in performance in all areas. Running Winrar with the TBL fix enabled is as good as disabling 3 out of the 4 cores.




Test Platform

CPU:	AMD Phenom 9850 (2.5GHz) AMD Phenom 9750 (2.4GHz) AMD Phenom 9550 (2.2GHz) AMD Phenom 9600 (2.3GHz) AMD Phenom 9500 (2.2GHz) Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 (2.50GHz/1333MHz) Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.40GHz/1066MHz) Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 (2.66GHz/1333MHz) Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 (2.66GHz/1333MHz)
Motherboard:	ASUS P5E3 Deluxe (X38) MSI K9A2 Platinum (790FX)
Chipset Drivers:	Intel 8.1.1.1010 (Intel) AMD Catalyst 8.3
Hard Disk:	Western Digital Raptor 150GB
Memory:	Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800 4-4-4-12 (1GB x 2) Corsair XMS3 DDR3-1066 7-7-7-20 (1GB x 2)
Video Card:	eVGA GeForce 8800 GT SSC
Video Drivers:	NVIDIA ForceWare 169.25
Desktop Resolution:	1920 x 1200
OS:	Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit

Next Page

Part 1: Introduction, Overclocking & Test Platform
Part 2: Benchmarks
Part 3: Gaming & Power Consumption

Guess what just woke me up -- Car Accident

A loud bang woke me up @ 1010am, took a look outside the window & saw the damage...



The traffic light knocked down, blocking the whole road.
Saw the passenger in jeans climbing out of the taxi's front seat, didn't see the driver though...




I dunno what happened. But it looks to me like the white car was turning to make a turn and the taxi was going straight, the rest you can use your imagination.





30min passed, no ambulance, no fire engine, no police cars, nothing...

The traffic jam behind is getting worse.
who's gonna clean up this mess?

Solution to the PCI-Express X1 bug Part2

Continued from Part1...


Test Platform:

Processor: Intel Core2Quad Q6600 @ 3.2Ghz (355x9)
Motherboard: Asus P5B-E Plus Rev.1G (BIOS 0627)
Memory: Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 2x512MB @ (888Mhz 4-4-4-12 2T) Graphics: MSI 8800GT 512MB OC T2D512E (660/950)
Storage: Hitachi 160GB SATA300
Power Supply: Coolermaster iGreen 500W
Monitor: BenQ FP202W 20.1" 8ms

O/S: Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2 32-bit DirectX 9.0c Driver: Forceware 169.28 WHQL
Chipset: Intel INF 8.3.1009
BIOS: 0627
3DMark06 1.0.2 (default setting)
Crysis v1.1 (benchmark tool 1.0.0.5) High 0xAA 0xAF @ 1680x1050 Company of Heroes 1.4 (Max everything @ 1680x1050) PCI-E @ 100Mhz




Impact on HD content:



-I tried a handful of full HD 1080p movie trailers from Apple. Although it's CPU-rendered, but it will be slowed down to a Powerpoint slideshow upon playback, with frame-skips.




Test Results:

PCIE Lanes (Core/Shader/Memory)



On average, 3DMark06 score increased by a staggering 275%!





Though not as significant as 3DMark06,
but the average fps was boost by 183%.





Crysis enjoyed a 223% increase in framerate, as it is a very GPU intensive game, especially with the High settings and resolutions.



Raw Data:



For those who are interested in raw numbers.




Screen-shots (click to enlarge):



Highest possible setting in Company of Heroes.





CoH @ X16: I ran this benchmark at least a dozen times in total, because unlike Crysis & 3DMark06, it's results fluctuate pretty violently.





Crysis (gpu default) @ X1





Crysis (gpu default) @ X16





Crysis (gpu overclock) @ X1





Crysis (gpu overclock) @ X16





3DMark06 (gpu default) @ X1




3DMark06 (gpu default) @ X16





3DMark06 (gpu overclock) @ X1





3DMark06 (gpu overclock) @ X16

Solution to the PCI-Express X1 bug Part1

Solution to the PCI-Express X1 bug:

The reason on why I wrote this article, is simply because I have seen many whom had their board's PCI-Express bus width stuck at X1 while overclocking (especially the Asus P5B series). So today, we are going to find out what will work and what won't, as well as it's impact on gaming & HD content.





Motherboards that might be affected:
-Asus P5B vanilla
-Asus P5B-E Plus
-Asus P5B Deluxe/Wifi
-Asus P35C-DS3R
-Asus P5K-E WiFi
-Gigabyte P35-DS3L
-GigaByte P31-S3G




Graphics Cards that might be affected:
-Radeon X1950Pro
-Radeon X1950XT
-Nvidia 8800GT


How to check if you are affected:

Download CPU-Z or GPU-Z



if your PCI-E bus is running at x1, you are affected by the bug,




else if its running at x16, then you are not affected by the bug.



Rumored solutions that doesn't work:
-Setting the PCIE Bus Frequency to 96Mhz
-Setting the PCIE Bus Frequency to 101Mhz
-PCI Synchronization Mode to 33.33 MHz
-Updating the BIOS



Solution that worked:

-Disbable "PEG Force X1"
-Set the NB Vcore to 1.55v or below (corrected)






In the next part, we are going to show you what kind of "damage" the bug causes.

Proceed to Part2

Cartel & Soccer with Zx

Met Zx @ IMM for dinner, haven seen him for like a year already...





Had dinner @ Cartel, this gigantic pork rib can feed a family of 4...





Wanted to treat him, but ended up he treating me instead (-_-)"





Walked to Chevron watch the ManU vs Liverpool match on the 200-inch screen..

Well, the picture is blurry & the smoke is suffocating =X

ManU won 3-0 anyway..