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Beyond Gaming - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB GDDR3

By Vincent Chang - 16 Jun 2008

Test Setup

Test Setup

We had two separate test systems for the GeForce GTX 280, one on Windows XP SP2 and the other using Windows Vista SP1. This was done in order to run some of the newer, more extreme benchmarks that required DirectX 10, while keeping the older system as a reference point for some of the results. In the future, we should be moving over completely to a newer, Windows Vista based test system but for the moment, here are the configurations that we used:

Windows XP SP2 Test System

  • Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz)
  • Intel D975XBX 'Bad Axe' motherboard
  • 2 x 1GB DDR2-800 Kingston HyperX memory in dual channel mode
  • Seagate 7200.7 80GB SATA hard drive
  • Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 and DirectX 9.0c

Windows Vista SP1 Test System

  • Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 (3.00GHz)
  • Gigabyte X38T-DQ6 motherboard
  • 2 x 1GB DDR3-1333 memory in dual channel mode
  • Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive
  • Windows Vista Ultimate with SP1

We compared the GeForce GTX 280 against existing high-end GPUs from both ATI and NVIDIA, including the GeForce 9800 GX2, GeForce 9800 GTX and the Radeon HD 3870 X 2 and a CrossFireX pair of Radeon HD 3870 X2. As for the graphics drivers, the GeForce GTX 280 was tested using the latest ForceWare 177.34 from NVIDIA for both the Windows XP and Vista versions. The other NVIDIA cards were running ForceWare 175.16 while the ATI cards were on Catalyst 8.5.

The following benchmarks were tested using their built-in time demo or benchmarking tools:

For Windows XP:

  • Futuremark 3DMark06 (ver 110)
  • Company of Heroes (ver 1.3)
  • Crysis (ver 1.1)
  • Unreal Tournament 3 (ver 1.1)

For Windows Vista

  • Futuremark 3DMark Vantage (ver 101)
  • Crysis (ver 1.21)
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