R300 vs R350:
As
we mentioned earlier the R350 core is simply an R300 core clocked higher and
tuned for just a bit more performance. It's still built on the same 0.15
micron technology, and still has 107 million transistors.
ATi
tweaked the Hyper-Z III to be a bit more efficient with the Radeon 9800 Pro and
has been optimized for future games.
Unfortunately ATi was
pretty vague on the details of this tweaking, but when we clocked our
Crucial Radeon 9800 Pro at 325/310 (Radeon 9700 Pro defaults) and compared it to
our ATi Radeon 9700 Pro we get these results.
| 3DMark2001SE Benchmark Results
|
|
Video
Card |
3DMarks |
Ranking |
| 1. |
ATi
Radeon 9700 Pro |
15565 |
 |
| 2. |
Crucial Radeon 9800 Pro (325/310) |
15813 |
 |
| 3DMark03
Benchmark Results |
|
Video
Card |
3DMarks |
Ranking |
| 1. |
ATi
Radeon 9700 Pro |
4998 |
|
| 2. |
Crucial Radeon 9800 Pro (325/310) |
5082 |
|
While the
scores are very close the Crucial Radeon 9800 Pro does edge out the Radeon 9700
Pro in both tests. It looks like the memory controller is more efficient with
the R350!
Overclocking a fast card, faster!
Just because the Crucial
Radeon 9800 Pro is one of the fastest cards on the market doesn't mean we're not
going to overclock it. =
)
By default the R350 core is clocked at 380 MHz and
the memory at 340 MHz (up from 325/310 on the Radeon 9700 Pro).
With the stock
cooler we began to raise the core speed. The 400 MHz mark came and went easily,
425 MHz was no problems either. 430MHz, 440MHz, 450 MHz and still zero problems (with
an 80W pelt the highest we could get the Radeon 9700 Pro was 443 MHz!). Our core
overclocking adventure ended abruptly at 456 MHz. Anything higher and it would
start to artifact while running Quake III Arena.
We
had some luck in the past overclocking the naked Samsung 2.8ns BGA DRAM and
was hoping for the same with the Crucial Radeon 9800 Pro. In the end we hit
a maximum speed of 369 MHz which is not bad, but to be honest I was a
bit disappointed I couldn't go higher. Perhaps some RAMsinks would improve the
overclockability of the memory.
Please remember that we were overclocking with stock
cooling.
| pcstats test system
specs: |
|
|
computer
hardware: |
|
| processor: |
pentium 4 2.8 ghz |
| clock speed: |
21 x 133 mhz = 2.8 ghz |
| motherboards: |
msi gnb max-fisr* |
| chipsets: |
e7205 |
| videocard: |
ati radeon 9700 pro (325/620)
msi g4ti4600-td (300/650)
gigabyte radeon 9600 pro (400/600)
prolink geforcefx 5600 golden limited (325/600)
albatron geforcefx 5600p turbo (325/600)
crucial radeon 9800 pro (380/680)
crucial radeon 9800 pro (456/738) |
| memory: |
2x 256mb corsair xms3500 cas2 |
| hard drive: |
20gb maxtor
diamondmax+ |
| cdrom: |
nec 52x cd-rom |
| floppy: |
panasonic 1.44mb floppy drive
|
| heatsink: |
avc sunflower |
| powersupply: |
vantec 470w stealth psu |
| software setup |
windowsxp build 2600
intel
inf 5.10.1012
catalyst 3.5
detonator 44.03 |
| workstation benchmarks |
3dmark2001se
3dmark03
aquamark
codecreatures
commanche 4
gun metal 2
quake iii arena ver 1.17
ut2003
aa test, af and aa+af
test
3dmark2001se
quake iii arena |
* - 8x
agp was enabled and functioning properly during all testing.
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