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. 

Mid-range GPU comparison: Gigabyte GTS 250 1GB and 9600GT 512MB Graphics Cards - Graphics Cards 81

GTS 250 test setup

 

Mid-range GPU comparison: Gigabyte GTS 250 1GB and 9600GT 512MB Graphics Cards - Graphics Cards 82

9600GT test setup

 

Mid-range GPU comparison: Gigabyte GTS 250 1GB and 9600GT 512MB Graphics Cards - Graphics Cards 83  Mid-range GPU comparison: Gigabyte GTS 250 1GB and 9600GT 512MB Graphics Cards - Graphics Cards 84

GTS 250 GPU-Z settings

 

 

Mid-range GPU comparison: Gigabyte GTS 250 1GB and 9600GT 512MB Graphics Cards - Graphics Cards 85   Mid-range GPU comparison: Gigabyte GTS 250 1GB and 9600GT 512MB Graphics Cards - Graphics Cards 86

9600GT GPU-Z settings

 

 

Mid-range GPU comparison: Gigabyte GTS 250 1GB and 9600GT 512MB Graphics Cards - Graphics Cards 87    Mid-range GPU comparison: Gigabyte GTS 250 1GB and 9600GT 512MB Graphics Cards - Graphics Cards 88

Radeon 4770 GPU-Z settings

 

 

Test System Setup

CPU

AMD Phenom II X3 720 @ 2.8 GHz

Motherboard

GA-MA790FXT-UD5P + 790FX

Memory 

OCZ 2 x 2GB DDR3-1600

Hard Drive

Western Digital 160GB SATA 3GB/s 

Sound Card

Onboard sound

Video Card

Gigabyte GTS 250 1GB
Gigabyte 9600GT 512MB 
AMD Radeon HD 4770 512MB

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

 

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