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ASUS in Wonder? .... A Flawless Sapphire
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| Sapphire Ultimate RADEON 9600XT Edition and ASUS RADEON 9600XT ASUS in Wonder? .... A Flawless Sapphire | |
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(Review by MS, February 18, 2004) |
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ASUS RADEON 9600XT At: |
Test Configuration
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It may look a bit strange to pit the RADEON 9600XT against the above mentioned high-end cards but keep in mind that this competition is on average twice as expensive and we are not trying to show the "Winner" here but rather give some ideas of what kind of performance one can expect compared to those high-end cards - everything else being equal.
Benchmarks
It is no surprise but needs to be mentioned that the performance of the ASUS and the Sapphire cards was neck-to-neck, after all, both cards are using the same core and overall configuration with the biggest difference being the brand of the memory components used, that is: Samsung vs, Hynix. Since it is the controller that defines the operation and performance of the memory chips, there cannot be any performance difference unless the controller is different and since both cards are using the same controller, it is almost a moot point. However, in reality, we did see a small difference in performance, that is, on average, the Sapphire Ultimate RADEON Edition was about 2 % faster than the ASUS counterpart.
Click for larger image
As it turned out to be, the reason was the "Overdrive" automatic overclocking enabled on the Sapphire adapter - this tab was not an option with the ASUS card, despite the fact that the identical drivers were used. As a result, the core frequency of the Sapphire Ultimate Edition was defaulting to 526 MHz while the ASUS card was running at the standard 499 MHz. The memory speed was not affected by enabling Overdrive, in both cases, the default speed was 297 MHz clock / 594 MHz data rate.
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