Page 4: Benchmarks
<b>Benchmarks</b>:
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Test System:<br>
AMD 1GHz (266 FSB)<br>
ECS K7S5A<br>
256 MB DDR Ram (CAS2)<br>
16x/10x/32x TEAC CDrw<br>
8x DVD<br>
20GB 60GXP IBM HDD<br>
Latest Drivers for both video cards under Win2k SP2<br>
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<b>3Dmark 2001</b><br>
<img src="/images/r8500/3dmark.gif"></center><br>I included my aging Radeon 64 Vivo, but I really want to focus on the different BIOSs. As you can see, the slowest version of the 8500 easily doubles the performance of the Vivo. I think ATI has done a great drop with this video card. I spent the same amount for this card as I did 6 months ago for the original Radeon. 6 months makes a big difference. Anyway, At 230/230, the Radeon is seriously underclocked and it shows. Going up to the real OEM BIOS yields a 4-6% difference in 3Dmarks. Going from OEM to Retail yields a whopping 8-13% increase in 3Dmarks. Let's move on to GLmark.<br><br>
<center><img src="/images/r8500/glmark.gif"></center><br>In this benchmark, the video card scales almost perfectly with the resolution increase. The retail version of the R8500 compared to the Vivo yields a 75-175% improvement as the resolution goes higher. ATI has done a great job on effectively pushing the original Radeon to the low end of the market and I think it really gives the Geforce 3 line a run for its money. At 1024x768, the three different BIOSes are pretty much matched, the graphics card isn't the bottleneck now. The Retail compare to the Newegg BIOS yields a 2% improvement. Moving up to 1280x1024 shows a 4% improvement. As the resolution becomes higher and higher, the video card becomes the limiting factor in the system. Even though the CPU maybe slow, at higher resolutions, the video card becomes more important. At 1600x1200, the improvement goes to a whole 9%. That is a huge gain by just clocking the video card higher. As you can tell, there are many improvements that are made when going to the retail BIOS.<br><br><center><img src="/images/r8500/spec.gif"></center>
<br>I don't like SPEC for one reason, my CPU is to slow to handle the type of numbers for this video card. It seems that SPEC really needs a speedy CPU to produce better results and I just don't have one to use. But, in most categories, the Vivo gets shot down. As you can see by the numbers on the R8500, the CPU is the limiting factor. I'll try to get a faster CPU soon enough to run better and many more benchmarks.
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