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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rupe120 - Wednesday, December 3, 2003 - link
So no dual Opteron test?Nighteye2 - Wednesday, December 3, 2003 - link
About the not working well with 4 sticks of RAM: maybe there are only 2 banks for each processor, given that each processor has it's own memory controller?MS - Wednesday, December 3, 2003 - link
Wes,ok, I would need to check which version I am using .... D'UH, here it is: 3.43 from June 20 (release date). I guess I need oto check with nVidia and see whether there are newer drivers that increase performance :-)
Thanks!!
(gotto run a few errands now, be back later)
Wesley Fink - Wednesday, December 3, 2003 - link
Michael,We don't generally use nVidia's IDE drivers either, but we do use the chipset driver set. The nForce unified drivers released just a few weeks ago appear to improve performance quite a bit on the nF3 compared to the earlier unified driver.
MS - Wednesday, December 3, 2003 - link
Wes,Thanks for clearing that one up, actually I am just using a standard Barracuda SATA -V drive on the SiI controller without the nForce drivers, also, I am getting some 59.8 - 59.9 on the ASUS K8V and the ABIT KV8 MAX3 (VIA chipset)
With respect to the GunMetal benchmark, I am (presumably) using the same system as the one you have and the only thing that makes a difference there is how much eye-candy is turned on or off. --- I don't know either what to say here but GM appears to be more GPU limited than anything else. Which is why I would like to find out about your magic sauce for the FX-51..
Wesley Fink - Wednesday, December 3, 2003 - link
Michael - The Dell is a 3.2 P4, while the Shuttle AN50R is an nForce3-150 Athlon64. You likely used nVidia's latest drivers, which do improve benchmark performance. We are using them for our upcoming reviews, but the nF3-150 scores were from earlier reviews using the slower earlier drivers. Those are likely the differences between your scores and ours.As I stated in the review, the Gun Metal 2 scores among FX51 chipsets remain a mystery. We are searching for answers.
MS - Wednesday, December 3, 2003 - link
"While Dell just achieved the first Content Creation score to approach 60, the Titan FX scores almost 70 in the same test. The Titan FX score of 67.9 is almost 10 points higher than the best that we have ever seen in this benchmark. That is 10 points better than a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 running almost the same components in the Dell Dimension XPS."Huh???
We are getting over 60 with a standard Shuttle AN50R (single drive) and almost 65 with the FX-51 system, what's wrong here?
Also, I don't quite understand the GunMetal benchmark results of the FX51 system, can you elaborate on those, that is, why is the FX51 system so much faster than anything else? Just curious what it is that I am overlooking here...
Doop - Wednesday, December 3, 2003 - link
Well that's good Wesley Fink...AMD said they wouldn't work, you tested and they didn't work.Sorry for the comment about the article didn't mean to offend, I just usually expect AnandTech to be the most complete.
It just seemed obvious to me to wonder why they would ship a single only CPU in a dual mobo. Glad you made the effort to check. Take care.
stncttr908 - Tuesday, December 2, 2003 - link
Wow, if I were rich and didn't build my own systems, this would be on my desk in a heartbeat.rupe120 - Tuesday, December 2, 2003 - link
So when will the article be redone with dual Opterons? :o)