PowerColor X1550 512MB Extreme Video Card Review

Testing

Testing Setup
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo e6600 @ 2.4ghz
Mother Board: eVGA 680i SLI "AR"
Memory: Crucial Ballistix 2x1gbDDR2 1000 @ 800mhz 4-4-4-12
Video Card: PowerColor X1550 Extreme 512mb PCI-E
Sound: Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
Hard Drives: 2xWestern Digital 80gb SATA2 8mb RAID-0
PSU: Etasis 850watt Gaming
Case: Apevia X-Pleasure

Video Cards

• PowerColor X1550 Extreme entry-level
• Sapphire X850XT PCI-E 256MB mid-range
  
• eVGA 8800GTS 640MB high-end
  

Drivers:

• ATI Catalyst 7.1 (X1550 & X850XT)
  
• nVIdia Forceware 97.22 (8800GTS)
  

It is a video card, so we naturally test it by running games for benchmarks! In all of our benchmarks, we test at the following resolutions: 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024, today's average resolutions. Also, all our games are tested at approximately 3/4s of their maximum quality. As usual, all the results are average FPS. I will be comparing this entry-level card with a mid-range, X850XT, and a high-end card, the 8800GTS.

Far Cry

Far Cry, A slightly dated game but it still gives many of today's latests cards a run for their money. It is still a beautiful game which revolutionized the gaming industry in graphics.

Settings

• Maximum quality option, Direct3D rendered
• Level: Volcano
• Pixel shader: model 2.0b
• Antialiasing: 4×
• Anisotropic filtering: 8×
• HDR: disabled
• Geometry Instancing: disabled
• Normal-maps compression: disabled