LOSTCIRCUITS

Test Configuration

It is somewhat interesting that only about one year after the introduction of PCIe, the only motherboard with an AGP interface left in our labs is the DFI 855 GME board running an overclocked Dothan processor at 2.26 MHz. Everything else was destroyed one way or the other in the wake of some more extended testing or modding of the boards. One thing to be aware of is the fact that the 855 chipset only supports AGP x4 and not AGP x8, however, again, this is just the type of scenario that an upgrade solution would drop in. Moreover, as we showed repeatedly, there is no real world performance gain associated with an AGP x8 interface compared to the x4 version. On the upside, the Dothan, especially in its overclocked form as what we are using here is one of the most powerful gaming processors out there, beating even Socket 939 Athlon64 processors in a number of applications at low resolution where CPU power actually matters. For the benchmarks run here, CPU power hardly matters in that all applications were run at resolutions high enough to make the GPU the performance bottleneck. For comparison, we dug out a 2 years old ATI X800 Pro with similar paper specs, albeit no support for SM3.0.

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