Intel VS. AMD : Nvidia
Below you'll see the latest in graphics technology from NVIDIA that was used in our benchmarks. We had to go with the latest and greatest because of the availability of only a PCI-Express x16 slot on the Intel motherboard. A GeForce 6800GT PCI-Express. This card is an x16 PCI-Express device, so it has more than enough bandwidth to work at maximum capability. Also below, you will see the AGP version of the same card made by eVGA. The performance of both cards should be virtually identical as shown by many other hardware sites. AGP 8X actually has enough bandwidth for all modern graphics cards.
top bottem power supply connecter
NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT PCI-Express
We may cover these cards more in a later review but, in brief, these cards represent the best in graphics for Linux. The only faster card available is the GeForce 6800Ultra model which has a 50MHz faster core and memory. NVIDIA's drivers for these cards work exceptionally well and thanks to their new NVIDIA-Settings utility, setting anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering where you want them is a breeze. They also now have support for many other new settings and monitoring of the on-board temperature monitor
The Setup
The table below shows our configurations used in the three systems we're using for performance testing. Most of these components we've been over above, but we'd like to point out a few points of interest. In our benchmarks we will not only be comparing AMD to Intel but also Intel to Intel. We'll be looking at how Intel's new platform coupled with DDR2 and an updated chipset will perform verses their previous platform running on the 875P. For this test we've thrown in their D875PBZ board fitted with a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, which is identical to the Extreme Edition chip in the new LGA775 package. For benchmarking, we equipped both machines with a Creative Labs Audigy sound card. We felt that this was only fair so that immature drivers for the on-board sound (which is questionable even when working correctly) would not affect our scores.
We used Gentoo Linux as the distribution of choice on all three systems. We tested both of the Intel platforms using 32-bit x86 Gentoo optimized by compiling everything with “-O3 -mcpu=pentium4”. We tested our Athlon 64 system with both 32-bit x86 Gentoo with “-O3 -mcpu=athlon-xp -msse2” optimizations and 64-bit AMD64 Gentoo with “-02” optimizations (by default GCC 3.3 for AMD64 optimizes for Athlon 64 processors). GCC version 3.3.4 was used for compiling the system. We used the latest stable kernel available to us, 2.6.8, for all testing. Since Gentoo has moved away from XFree86's implementation due to license issues, so have we. We used X.org's X which was currently available at version 6.7.0. For proper support of the new GeForce 6800GT cards, we used NVIDIA's latest drivers, 1.0-6111.
