Workstation Graphics: AGP Cross Section 2004

The Test

The test system is an IWill DK8N board powered by a 520W OCZ Powerstream PSU. The Dual Opteron 250 system had 2 GB of RAM (1 GB for each processor), and although the board supports NUMA, the feature was not enabled for this test. The IWill motherboard is simply an amazing workstation platform. It can handle up to 16GB of RAM, is loaded with PCI-X slots, and is jam-packed with features. Since the DK8N is a hybrid AMD chipset and nForce 3 motherboard, IWill is able to bring workstation users the best of the DP world and the desktop world in one package.

The dual configuration helps to keep the majority of the load on the graphics card in our testing. It may be interesting to experiment with single, dual and quad processor workstation scaling in the future. For now, this box will work beautifully for our tests.

The drivers that we chose to use for our workstation graphics cards were all beta or pre-release drivers, which each vendor assures us passes internal Q/A as far as image quality is concerned. NVIDIA sees the most performance improvement when moving from their 6x.xx series driver to the 70.41 series driver. In fact, when SPECviewperf 8 was launced in September, 3Dlabs Wildcat Realizm 200 cards lead performance in 7 out of 8 tests. The performance trends are quite different in today's lineup, as NVIDIA's driver team has done quite well to gain performance from professional level applications on the 6 Series architecture with the 7x.xx series driver. Of course, this makes us very interested in revisiting this test with a GeForce card when we have a 70 series ForceWare driver available.

Performance Test Configuration
Processor(s):	2 x AMD Opteron 250
RAM:	4 x 512MB OCZ PC3200 EL ECC Registered (2 per CPU)
Hard Drive(s):	Seagate 120GB 7200RPM IDE (8MB Buffer)
Motherboard & IDE Bus Master Drivers:	AMD 8131 APIC Driver NVIDIA nForce 5.10
Video Card(s):	3Dlabs Wildcat Realizm 200 ATI FireGL X3-256 NVIDIA Quadro FX 4000 HIS Radeon X800 XT Platimum Edition IceQ II Prolink GeForce 6800 Ultra Golden Limited
Video Drivers:	3Dlabs 4.04.0608 Driver ATI FireGL 8.08-041111a-019501E Performance Driver NVIDIA Quadro 70.41 (Beta) NVIDIA ForceWare 67.03 (Beta) ATI Catalyst 4.12
Operating System(s):	Windows XP Professional SP2 (without pae kernel)
Motherboards:	IWill DK8N v1.0 (AMD-81xx + NVIDIA nForce 3)
Power Supply:	520W OCZ Powerstream PSU

And to power our monster of a system, we needed a PSU that could deliver the juice. Once again, we turned to our OCZ Powerstream PSU. Even with 2 Opteron 250s, a GeForce 6800 Ultra, 2GB of RAM, and a couple of drives attached, the OCZ power supply had no problem keeping our machine fed. More importantly, the modular connectors allow us to hook up our PSU to a standard 20-pin ATX, 24-pin ATX12V like 915/925/nforce 4 boards use, and the 24-pin EPS12V that most workstation boards require.

We chose to run with a desktop resolution of 1280x1024x32 @85Hz. All the Windows XP eye candy was turned off and tuned for performance. Our virtual memory pagefile was set to 4092MB min and max, and system restore was turned off. After all applications were installed and all benchmarks were run once, the system was defragmented.