Greater Graphics

How We Test

For 'Two Cards or One, That Is the Question'

In this section of the February 2006 graphics card roundup, we tested both a mainstream and a high-end SLI graphics card combination using Alienware's Aurora 7500 SLI system.

This system featured a 2.8-GHz-Athlon 64 FX-57 CPU, 1GB DDR400 SDRAM, and a striped RAID hard-drive configuration. We recorded the frame rates of a variety of games at 1024 by 768 and 1600 by 1200 resolutions with and without 4X antialiasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled.

Games included Battlefield 2, Half-Life 2, Quake 4, and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory.

For '$100 Cards Bump Up Performance, on a Budget'

In this section, we wanted to get an idea of what benefits a $100 graphics card could give to an upgradable system with integrated graphics. We tested a couple of these low-cost cards using a $1395 Dell Dimension 5150 system.

After running a series of tests using the Graphics Media Accelerator 950 chip that was integrated in the Dell's Intel 945G chip set, we upgraded the system with two value-oriented PCI Express graphics cards.

The Dell system also featured a 3.2GHz-Pentium D 640 processor, 512MB DDR2-400 SDRAM, and a 250GB hard drive. We recorded the frame rates of a variety of games at 1024 by 768 and 1600 by 1200 resolutions with and without 4X antialiasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled.

Games included Battlefield 2, Half-Life 2, Quake 4, and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory.

We also tested each setup with our real-world productivity application benchmark suite, WorldBench 5.

How We Test Graphics Cards

A new suite of tests for a new generation of cards: PC World's testing philosophy has always been--and continues to be--to evaluate computer products in real-world settings, with applications that an average PC user is likely to use day in and day out.

Accordingly, the PC World Test Center has introduced a new suite of graphics card tests featuring the latest games that better represent today's real-world use. Why games? Because that's where the most sophisticated and demanding programming tends to occur, and is generally what graphic cards are purchased for. Even if you're not planning to use a new graphics card specifically for games, these tests are still the best way to evaluate a card.

Our February 2006 graphics card roundup included two Top 5 charts: mainstream ($150 to $299) and power ($300 and higher). For these charts we tested each graphics card on a 2.4-GHz-Athlon 64 4000+ system with 2GB DDR400 SDRAM and a striped RAID hard-drive configuration.

We recorded the frame rates of a variety of games at resolutions of 1024 by 768 and 1600 by 1200 pixels with and without 4X antialiasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled (where supported). The games we used included Battlefield 2, Half-Life 2, Quake 4, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, Far Cry, Doom3, Halo, and Unreal Tournament 2004.

We also recorded the frame rates of a variety of animations in Autodesk's 3ds Max version 8, an industry-standard 3D modeling application. 3ds max is run at the desktop resolution of 1280 by 1024 in both DirectX 9 and OpenGL modes.

Besides performance, each card is evaluated on several aspects, including its specifications, price, bundled software, and overall design.

Richard Baguley is a San Francisco Bay Area-based freelance writer. Tom Mainelli is a senior editor for PC World.