34 MAXIMUMPC | FEB (^08) | http://www.maximumpc.com
MAXIMUMPC
CHALLENGE
ANOTHER
HOW WE
TESTED
A lot of thought went into developing our
test methodology. Here are the details
regarding the hardware and software we
used, along with our rationale for mak-
ing these choices
THE HARDWARE
The fact that we awarded HP’s VoodooPC-
designed Blackbird 002 a 7 verdict in our
Holiday 2007 issue didn’t dissuade us
from using the innovative rig for this chal-
lenge. Although we panned the particular
eval unit we received because it included
Radeon HD 2900 XT cards in CrossFire,
instead of the much faster GeForce 8800
GTX or Ultra cards, we lavished praise on
its innovative industrial design, supremely
quiet cooling apparatus, and—most sig-
nifi cantly—its ability to run either two
Nvidia cards in SLI or two Radeon cards in
CrossFire on an SLI motherboard.
That unprecedented flexibility
prompted us to request a matched set
of Blackbirds from HP, each equipped
with an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850
quad-core CPU (3GHz, overclocked to
3.33GHz), 2GB of Corsair Dominator
XMS2 DDR2 RAM, and three Western
Digital 160GB Raptor hard drives (in RAID
0). All of this was plugged into an Asus
Striker Extreme Nvidia nForce 680i SLI
motherboard.
We asked HP to confi gure one rig
with two ATI Radeon HD 3870 cards
in CrossFire and one with two Nvidia
GeForce 8800 Ultra cards in SLI. We also
asked HP to provide us with two additional
cards from each camp (more on that later).
We chose the Radeon HD 3870 cards
because they’re based on the best GPU
that AMD currently has to offer.
We soon realized we’d made a mis-
take in configuring the machine with 8800
Ultra cards, however, because those
cards don’t support HDCP on both links
in their dual-link DVI connectors. Without
that, you can’t view encrypted HD video
content in high definition on a 30-inch
LCD (our screen choice for this chal-
lenge). The other problem was that the
Ultras were too fast for our purposes:
We couldn’t come close to synchronizing
frame rates in our gaming tests on the ATI
and Nvidia machines.
So we moved down to Nvidia’s 8800
GT. It supports HDCP on both links, the
frame buffers on the cards we selected
are the same size (512MB) as those
on the 3870s, and the ATI and Nvidia
cards would run our game benchmark
at approximately the same speed (our
objective being image-quality compari-
son, not frame-rate measurement).
We paired the Blackbirds with identical
HP LP3065 30-inch LCD monitors. We set
the brightness controls to the same val-
ues, and then calibrated the two monitors
using a Pantone HueyPro calibration kit.
THE BENCHMARKS
We chose the cinematic built-in bench-
mark from World in Conflict to test DirectX
10 gaming performance (we remain
unimpressed with Vista, but these GPUs
were ostensibly designed for DirectX 10
performance). In order to achieve the
smoothest frame rate, we reduced the
game’s resolution to 1280x800, set most
of its values to medium, and turned off
the water-reflection settings. This enabled
both cards to run the demo at about 40
frames per second.
We had our test subjects view a
sequence from the HD DVD disc Blue
Planet to evaluate high-defi nition video
quality. This IMAX fi lm features spectacu-
lar clips fi lmed from above and around
the planet, which made for a much
more diverse viewing experience than a
Hollywood movie would have provided.
For our fi nal test, we asked our test
subjects to examine a very high defi nition
(2592x3888 pixels) portrait of a female
model, shot with a Canon EOS-1D Mark
III (we obtained the photo from Canon’s
website). See representative samples from
each of our tests on the next page.
HP’s Blackbird 002 enabled us to compare SLI and CrossFire videocard performance in otherwise identical rigs.
dariusz
(Dariusz)
#1