Comparisons and Test System Setup
For comparison purposes, we chose to match up Gigabyte’s GTS 250 and 9600GT against an ATI Radeon 4770 to showcase a couple decent cards that can be found in the mid-range class of graphics cards. The Radeon 4770 is the newer card of the three and also sports one of the first 40nm GPUs in existence. The $99 price tag also puts it squarely in the mid-range GPU class.
GTS 250 test setup
9600GT test setup
GTS 250 GPU-Z settings
9600GT GPU-Z settings
Radeon 4770 GPU-Z settings
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Test System Setup |
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CPU |
AMD Phenom II X3 720 @ 2.8 GHz |
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Motherboard |
GA-MA790FXT-UD5P + 790FX |
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Memory |
OCZ 2 x 2GB DDR3-1600 |
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Hard Drive |
Western Digital 160GB SATA 3GB/s |
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Sound Card |
Onboard sound |
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Video Card |
Gigabyte GTS 250 1GB
|
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Video Drivers |
NVIDIA: 190.38
AMD: Catalyst 9.7 |
| Power Supply | PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750w |
|
DirectX Version |
DX10 / DX9c |
|
Operating System |
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit |
Here’s a quick run-down of all the games we used for the gaming benchmark section of this review.
- Call of Duty: World at War
- Crysis Warhead
- Far Cry 2
- World in Conflict
- 3DMark Vantage
We also added a new GPGPU benchmark section to show off what NVIDIA CUDA and ATI Stream technologies can do for users who like video transcoding. The main transcoding application we chose to use was Cyberlink’s MediaShow Espresso, which supports CUDA and Stream. The files we used during our GPGPU benchmarks were:
- 1:50 minute “The Plush Life” 1280×720 MPEG-2 file outputted to M2TS file using PS3 profile upconverted to 1920×1080
- 10 secs “Flowers” 1920×1200 MTS file outputted to MP4 using Youtube profile at 1280×720
- 2:51 minute “HD Get Out Las Vegas” 1280×720 MP4 using iPhone profile at 640×360
