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ASUS Extreme AX800XL-2DTV: Spending $500+ isn't for everyone, but you'll be surprised how well a sub-$400 card may do. |
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| Date: |
May 12, 2005 |
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| Written By: |
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| Price: |
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3D quality is the last quality test we will look at. All video cards offer some form of antialiasing and ansiotropic filtering, from the 16X Ansio of the ATi cards, to the 8X AA of the nVidia based cards and even the 16X FAA of the Matrox video card. So lets see how each video card looks in our testing.
Looking first at the AA test we see that there is very little difference between the three cards without AA enabled. With the various levels of AA enabled (16,8,6,4) we see that the Parhelia comes out on top but only by a slim margin. If you look at the landscape in the background on the 5900 Ultra and PCX5750 and the Parhelia, you can notice that the Parhelia has just a smoother image. The Radeon 9000 is in last place in this test with its maximum of 4X AA. The 6X AA is pretty nice, looking better on more horizontal lines (horizon) than the 8X of the 5900U but worse with a more vertical line (rooftop).
Moving to the ansiotropic filtering of the cards, with it disabled the Parhelia has better filtering. You can notice that the ground seems 'bumpier' on the Parhelia without ansiotropic filtering even enabled, otherwise all of the other cards look very similar. With ansiotropic filtering enabled, we see that in this part of the image the Radeon 9000 doesn't really do much if any filtering, due to its adaptive design. The Parhelia's 2X ansio looks slightly better than its trilinear filtering. The Radeon x800XL has extremely good ansiotropic filtering as at 16X it is much better than any other non ATi card we have tested so far. I am also impressed by the 8X ansiotropic filtering of the nVidia based card, though it is still not quite the same quality as the ATi cards with 16X.
Overclocking
This is a mid range video card, which is what most people want to overclock with as its less expensive than the high end, but usually can overclock fairly well. Lets see what this card can do, but remember that experiences will vary in this area depending on many different variables.
We managed to get to an overclock of 432MHz for the core and 520MHz (1040MHz) for the memory. This is up from the 398MHz core clock and 492MHz memory clock that comes standard with this card. The increases are 8.5% and 5.5% respectively, not much but it might provide some gain in frame rate.
System Setup
| CPU: |
Intel Pentium IV 520 2.8E (14*200MHz)
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| Motherboard: |
Albatron 915G Pro
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| Memory: |
2*512MB Corsair TwinX4000 |
| Hard Drives: |
80GB WD Caviar SE
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| Video Card: |
Asus Extreme AX800XL-2DTV - 398/490MHz - 432/520MHz |
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HIS X700Pro IceQ Turbo VIVO 256MB 425/430MHz - 492/492MHz |
| Operating System: |
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 w/Direct X 9.0c |
| Drivers: |
ATi Catalyst 5.2 |
| Cooler: |
Swiftech H20-120 Rev 3 |
| Case: |
CoolerGuys Windtunnel IV |
| Power Supply: |
RaidMax 400Watt Power Supply |
| Software: |
Fraps 2.5.3 |
Bench'em All 2.654 |
| Direct X Benchmarks: |
Unreal Tournament 2004 (Self made Demo) |
Splinter Cell - Beyond 3D Demo |
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Far Cry |
Half Life II - Anandtech Canals Test |
| OpenGL Benchmarks: |
Doom 3 timedemo |
Spec Viewperf 8.0 |
All tests with the cards were done with AA and ansiotropic filtering disabled as well as 4X AA and 16X ansiotropic filtering enabled. Resolutions of 1024*768 and 1600*1200 were used for tests except for the Spec test, which is run with the 2D resolution of 1600*1200. Bench'em All was used to test all the games with Fraps running in the background to get the per second frame rate.
As for the specific demos used, UT2004 was a demo that I recorded of the Antalus level with a limit of about 15 frags. The Far Cry demo is the default demo that Bench'em All uses. With Half Life II I use the Canal-08 test from Anandtech as it provides both internal and external views in the test. Doom 3 was the default timedemo that was included with the full game. With Splinter Cell we used the Caspin Oil Refinery test from Beyond 3D. Lets see if the higher end x800XL can beat the x700Pro handily.
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