Elite PC Titan FX: Setting New Standards in Gaming
by Wesley Fink on November 30, 2003 10:57 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Elite PC Titan FX: The Test
The full suite of AnandTech benchmarks was run with the Elite PC Titan FX gaming system. Elite PC shipped the system with an ATI Radeon 9800 XT video card, which was used for all benchmarks. The Elite PC Titan FX is configured almost exactly like the Dell Dimension XPS gaming system that we recently tested, so benchmarks are directly comparable between the Dell XPS and Titan FX systems. The Dell uses the 3.2 Pentium 4, while the Elite PC is using the Athlon64 FX51.Please keep in mind that all of our other comparison benchmarks, except the Elite PC and Dell, were run with the ATI Radeon 9800 PRO, which is slightly slower. The 9800 PRO and XT use essentially the same GPU, but the XT is clocked a bit faster than the 9800 PRO. For a better idea on how the two cards compare, please refer to our benchmarks in AnandTech's ATI 9800 XT review.
Memory timings were run with the memory and setup as provided by Elite PC. We confirmed with CPU-Z 1.20a that the Titan FX runs the installed DDR400 memory at 2-3-2-8 timings. This compares to the 2-2-2-6 timings we normally use in our component reviews at DDR400.
The Titan FX was delivered with a full installation of Windows XP Professional, which is our standard OS, and we made no attempt to reinstall. We test systems as delivered, tweaking just the items to make the fairest comparisons to our archived test results. To provide the best test results under these circumstances, all co-resident applications and special services loading at startup were turned off so they would not load at boot. Benchmarks were installed and run from the nearly empty 75GB SATA RAID array. AnandTech benchmarks are normally run with sound disabled to remove the influence of varying overhead depending on the sound chip used on the board or video card. We therefore disabled all sound on the Elite PC Titan FX to provide the most comparable benchmarks. As we did on the recent test of the Dell XPS, we disabled all Creative Audigy drivers in the Control Panel System profile.
As already stated, the Titan FX and Dell XPS are almost identical in their configuration, except for CPU, and can be directly compared. The Dell uses the top 3.2GHz Pentium 4, while the Titan FX uses the top AMD Athlon64 FX51. We included results from the Asus P4C800-E, a top 875P motherboard, and top Athlon64 FX, Athlon 64, and Athlon XP 3200+ motherboards we have tested in our standard test configuration.
| Performance Test Configuration | |
| Processor(s): | AMD Athlon64 FX51 (2.2GHz) Intel Pentium 4 at 3.2GHz (800FSB) AMD Athlon64 3200+ (2.0GHz) AMD Athlon XP 3200+ (2.2GHz, 400MHz FSB) |
| RAM: | 2 x 512MB Mushkin ECC Registered PC3200 2 x 512MB Mushkin PC3500 Level II |
| Hard Drive(s): | 2 x 36.7 WD Raptor 10000 RPM drives in RAID 0 2 x 250 Dell 7200 drives in RAID 0 Maxtor 120GB 7200 RPM (8MB Buffer) |
| Video AGP & IDE Bus Master Drivers: | VIA 4in1 Hyperion 4.49 (August 20, 2003) Intel SATA RAID Drivers NVIDIA nForce version 2.45 (7/29/2003) |
| Video Card(s): | ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256MB (AGP 8X) ATI Radeon 9800 PRO 128MB (AGP 8X) |
| Video Drivers: | ATI Catalyst 3.8 |
| Operating System(s): | Windows XP Professional SP1 Windows XP Home (Dell Dimension XPS) |
| Motherboards: | MSI K8T Master 2-FAR in Elite PC Titan FX Dell Dimension XPS Gaming System Asus P4C800-E (Intel 875P) 3.2Ghz P4 Abit KV8-MAX3 Gigabyte K8NNXP-940 Athlon64 FX51 Chaintech ZNF3-150 (nForce3) Athlon64 3200+ MSI K8T Neo (VIA K8T800) Athlon64 3200+ DFI NFII Ultra (nForce2 U400) Barton 3200+ |
Recent performance tests on Athlon64, nForce2 Ultra 400 and Intel 875/865 boards used 2 x 512MB Mushkin PC3500 Level II Double-bank memory. The Athlon64 FX requires Registered or Registered ECC memory, so tests with the Elite PC Titan FX and Gigabyte K8NNXP-940 were performed with Mushkin High Performance ECC Registered DDR400 memory.
All performance tests were run with the ATI 9800 PRO 128MB video card with AGP Aperture set to 128MB with Fast Write enabled. Resolution in all benchmarks is 1024x768x32.
For the fairest comparisons, benchmarks were recompiled for the Asus P4C800-E using a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor.
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tfranzese - Tuesday, December 2, 2003 - link
Doop, no I don't feel like a fool. It's better to be informed than be completely ignorant like yourself. Even Wesley, the guy who wrote this article, was under the impression the current FX's were dual capable. It could either have been fixed by AMD or fixed in the BIOs for all you know.As for sales, sales don't determine leadership. As for the 8x thing, being first to market a new speed does not make you the leader. Am I not the only one disappointed that it can't do 8x + and - R?
And no, no one mentioned Pioneer in this article but neither did they mention Plextor. And you're kidding yourself if you think Plextor has the same prestiege in the DVD burner market as they did with CD burners. Plextors are good, but speed isn't what makes you the best.
Tweak - Tuesday, December 2, 2003 - link
oops, late post.Tweak - Tuesday, December 2, 2003 - link
Well Mr Fink, can you answer the dual FX question for us?You changed the typos, but completely ignored this MUCH more important querry.
In any case, if the 940pin Fx's are dual compatible it would be a reason for the 940 pinners to remain in existance after the release of the 939pin. The performance of the new 939's will probably destroy single chip 940's configs.
TheRealMandak - Tuesday, December 2, 2003 - link
1. The Athlon64FX IS an Opteron 148, a single server/workstation processor.2. The socket for the FX, vill change to 941. So you might get problems with upgrading this system or have to use Opteron's at a higher price. "hint" Change'en socket might give a small price drop to the FX, since it cannot work in servers/workstations any more. Properly depends on Prescott performance (but this is a guess).
3. It is not recommended to use 4 DIMMS in a single Athlon64/FX processor system, it will reduce performance.
4. The MSI K8T Master2 is NOT supporting dedicated RAM for both Processors in a dual setup. As the socket 940 designs describes. The 2.end Processor has to go through processor number 1, using Hyper Transport. Result, latency!!! And reduced performance. The MSI K8T Master2 not a great dual board. Maybe cheep but not great.
destaccado - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
#12 I said nothing negative about pioneer, and in terms of leadership do you mean sales? That pioneer may lead but I seem to recall plextor having the first 8x drive to market...that signifies leadership to me....and why would you bring up pioneer? They aren't using pioneer who makes really good burners, they're using MSI, now I'm not saying MSI is bad but you'd think for 3g's........AMDjihad - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
in yomammas face intel. you suck suck suck. Iknew this is much better, over 30000 3dmarks its better than anyting intel will make in the next years from prescott to tjas. amd will be market leader soonmizzouXC - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
I think these benchmarks are unfair to the Barton 3200+ setup. Every other system had Raid 0. While this won't make much difference in the brute force FPS competition, it does play into the everyday use (office) benchmarks. Other than that great comparison. I'd like to see these comparisons when we actually have a 64 bit O/S and 64 bit software....Doop - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
err tfranzese you feel like a fool now? Perhaps YOU should read the reviews before spouting complete bollocks about Athlon FX dual capability.tfranzese - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
Wesley, interesting. Is the second CPU showing in the system hardware section of XP's control panel? That should let you know if it's running as a dually or not.Wesley Fink - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
Elite PC has provided an update on Dual Processor usage. <em>"The only AMD processors that can be run in DUAL mode are the 200 and 800 series Opteron processors. The motherboard in the Titan FX machine will run all 940 pin processors, however only the 200 and 800 series Opteron processors will run as Dual processors."</em> We have just tried to benchmark the Titan FX system with 2 FX51, and while the system worked, the boot screen only identified ONE CPU even though two were installed. Oddly, the few benchmarks we ran were higher than single CPU, but not at the levels we would expect with Dual Opteron chips. Elite PC recommends the 200 or 800 Opterons for Dual CPU operation.An update with this information has been added to the review.