Elite PC Titan FX: Setting New Standards in Gaming
by Wesley Fink on November 30, 2003 10:57 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Gaming Performance
In every gaming benchmark, except Gun Metal 2, the Elite PC Titan FX rises to the top of gaming performance. A stock Aquamark 3 score of almost 50,000 is very impressive, but no less so than the 465fps in Quake 3. The Titan FX has been tweaked to demonstrate the gaming prowess of the Athlon64 FX chip and it really shows.
We suspect that the Gun Metal 2 results have more to do with the chipset used than actual performance. We have found the scores of the FX51 chips with this benchmark are very unusual, and we have asked Yeti Labs for help in understanding what is going on with this benchmark on nVidia and VIA chipsets.
Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby is the highest score that we have ever measured at stock speed. So are UT2003 Botmatch, Aquamark 3, X2, and Quake 3. Mpeg conversion is still led by the P4, but the Titan FX did post the highest AMD score that we have seen so far.
The Elite PC Titan FX lives up to its name in our gaming benchmark suite. It's the fastest machine we have ever tested. Since the Titan FX was also tested with an installed Audigy 2 with disabled sound drivers, we can now be reasonably sure that our benchmark variations in our recent Dell Dimension XPS tests were not the result of remnants of Audigy sound drivers. Something else must be responsible for the variations we saw in the Dell scores, since none of the Titan FX scores appear to be compromised in any way.
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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)