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Today's video cards need to support three standards to make good gaming cards: OpenGL, DirectX 8.1, and DirectX 9. To address this we have selected the following benchmarks:

The applications in italics are synthetic benchmarks, while the others are all game-engine based. I installed a fresh copy of Windows XP Professional with all the latest patches and updates.

The benchmarks for this review were done using the following hardware:

The motherboard and RAM were all set to the BIOS defaults for speed, timings, and voltage throughout the testing process. All gaming benchmarks were set so that the details and eye candy were at their highest possible in-game settings.

Benchmarking. Whew, did I benchmark. Unfortunately for you, I was unable to overclock this card so there will not be any benchmarking comparison. Even a slight increase in core speed would cause artifacts. Before you stop reading, just see how the card performs at stock speeds. Oh yes, one more bit of bad news up front. When running benchmarks back to back, using a benchmarking program like Benchemall, the card overheated and experienced severe artifacts. So I had to run most the benchmarks one-by-one to decrease temps. Although I live in Texas , I don't live in the desert. It is about 78 degrees in my room on average. Occasionally these temps increase with maximum CPU use.