MaximumPC 2006 06

66 MA XIMUMPC JUNE 2006

in the lab REAL-WORLD TESTING: RESULTS. ANALYSIS. RECOMMENDATIONS

BEST OF THE BEST

High-end videocard:

XFX GeForce 7900 GTX

(model PV-T71F-YDD9)

Boasts core and memory clocks of

700- and 900MHz, respectively,

versus the reference design’s 650-

and 800MHz clocks.

Midrange videocard:

eVGA e-GeForce 7900 GT CO

Superclocked

Nearly as fast as a Radeon X1900

XT, for $200 less

Soundcard:

Creative Labs X-Fi Xtreme Music

Hard drive:

Western Digital WD5000KD

Add 100GB to our favorite

WD4000KD and you get a new king

of the hill

External backup drive:

Western Digital Dual-Option Media

Center 320GB

Portable USB drive:

Seagate Portable External Hard

Drive 100GB

DVD burner:

Plextor PX-716A

Widescreen LCD monitor:

Dell 2405FPW

Desktop LCD monitor:

NEC 90GX2

A unique glossy screen makes this

monitor’s picture sparkle

Socket 939 Athlon 64 mobo:

MSI K8N Diamond Plus

Socket 775 Pentium 4 mobo:

We’re recommending that readers

hold off on P4 board purchases until

official Conroe support is available

Portable MP3 player:

Apple iPod

5.1 speakers:

M-Audio Studiophile LX4 5.1 (LX4

2.1 with 5.1 Expander System)

2.1 speakers:

M-Audio Studiophile LX4 2.1

Mid-tower case:

Lian Li PCV-1100

Full-tower case:

Silverstone TJ07

Games we are playing: Elder

Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Condemed:

Criminal Origins, Battle for Middle

Earth: II, Galactic Civiliations II:

Dread Lords, Battlefield 2

Our monthly category-by-category

list of our favorite products. New

products are in red.

Continued from page 6 4

Asus’

nForce4-powered

A8N32-SLI boards are the

foundation upon which we’ve built our new

test rigs.

We’re running 2GB of

Corsair DDR400 in our new test beds. With

games like Battlefield 2 and Oblivion sucking

up memory, 1GB doesn’t cut it.

no Intel branding. To make sure everything

was kosher, we tested the multithreading

support on both Intel and AMD dual-core

processors. The result? At low resolu-

tions, when the videocards are taken out

of the equation, the Athlon 64 FX-60

was faster than a 3.46GHz Pentium

Extreme Edition 955.

Because the game doesn’t

feature a stock benchmark like

Doom 3, we recorded our own

custom demo that combines

both interior and exterior scenes in the game.

FEAR

Previously, we’ve used FutureMark’s 3DMark series

to benchmark Direct3D gaming performance. It was

our only option during a drought of benchmark-

able DirectX games that actually used advanced

GPU features. But FEAR’s integrated benchmark

fi ts our bill perfectly. FEAR uses advanced graph-

ics features, such as soft shadows, in its rendering

engine. There’s one catch, however: A bug in the

game prevents you from turning on soft shadows

and antialiasing at the same time. We opted for

soft shadows, which our testing shows is a more

stressful task for graphics cards. We run the test

at 1600x1200 with physics and hardware audio

acceleration enabled, if available. The game is a test

of both the graphics card and the system’s CPU,

RAM, and chipset performance.

How to Read Our Benchmark Chart

Maximum PC’s test beds double as zero-point systems, against which all review systems

are compared. Here’s how to read our benchmark chart.

BENCHMARKS

SYS mark 2004 SE 275

ZERO POINT SCORES

Premiere Pro^3000 sec

Photoshop CS 295 sec

Recode 2.0 2100 sec

Fear 75 fps

Quake 4 110.5 fps

0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

Our current desktop test bed is a Windows XP SP2 machine, using a dual-core 2.6GHz Athlon 64

FX-60, 2GB of Corsair DDR400 RAM on an Asus A8N32-SLI motherboard, two GeForce 7900 GTX

videocards in SLI mode, a Western Digital 4000KD hard drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcard, and a

PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 850 PSU.

The scores achieved by our zero-point system are noted

in this column. They remain the same, month in, month

out, until we decide to update our zero-point.

The scores

achieved by the

system being

reviewed.

The bar graph indicates how much faster

the review system performed in respect

to the zero-point system. If a system

exceeds the zero-point performance by

more than 100 percent, the graph will

show a full-width bar and a plus sign.

The names

of the

benchmarks

used.

Every month we remind readers of our

key zero-point components.

3010 sec (-.33%)

290 sec

2080 sec

120 fps

160 fps (+113%)

280