Test Setup
We felt it best to include as many games as possible for our performance tests in order to get the best view of how these cards perform on both newer games and ones that have been around for a while. The games we used for our tests are Oblivion, Battlefield 2, Half-Life 2 Episode 1, Quake 4, Rise of Legends, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, and F.E.A.R. When possible, we ran the benchmarks at four resolutions, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200. F.E.A.R doesn't support 1280x1024, so we used 1280x960 instead, and Rise of Legends doesn't support resolutions lower than 1024x768.
Because some of these cards have only 128 MBs of memory, we ran tests at lower quality settings in each of the games for these cards, but we'll deal with these cards in the following "Lower Range Performance" section. We generally test with higher quality settings enabled because we find many gamers prefer to play games with graphics quality settings on high with "bells-and-whistles" like HDR effects, sacrificing their screen resolution to make up for the performance hit (especially given that a large number of gamers still use older monitors that can only display resolutions of up to 1280x1024 or 1600x1200). This isn't the case for all gamers, and many prefer higher resolutions and lower quality graphical settings; but for the purposes of this article we find this to be the best choice for testing.
Something to note is that many of these cards are clocked at the same reference speeds, so we will see several cards with identical numbers in our tests. Because we are dealing with so many cards, comparing performance between them all is somewhat daunting, but we hope to give the reader a good idea of how these cards rank in performance relative to each other for each of the games in the next sections.
This is the system we used for testing:
*Note that sound was disabled for testing. Testing was also performed in an open air environment rather than inside a case. This eliminated the need for a case fan, but it is not fully representative of how the various cards will run once placed inside a typical case. We will have a future article examining how the various silent cards perform inside a case, and depending on the case and cooling used overall temperatures may be lower or higher. As we stated in the introduction, we would advice some caution for those looking to build a fully silent computer. It is likely easier, cheaper, and more reliable to build a nearly-silent system by using a single low-RPM 120mm fan (perhaps with a voltage mod to further reduce fan speed) than to have an absolutely silent system that overheats under load.
We felt it best to include as many games as possible for our performance tests in order to get the best view of how these cards perform on both newer games and ones that have been around for a while. The games we used for our tests are Oblivion, Battlefield 2, Half-Life 2 Episode 1, Quake 4, Rise of Legends, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, and F.E.A.R. When possible, we ran the benchmarks at four resolutions, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200. F.E.A.R doesn't support 1280x1024, so we used 1280x960 instead, and Rise of Legends doesn't support resolutions lower than 1024x768.
Because some of these cards have only 128 MBs of memory, we ran tests at lower quality settings in each of the games for these cards, but we'll deal with these cards in the following "Lower Range Performance" section. We generally test with higher quality settings enabled because we find many gamers prefer to play games with graphics quality settings on high with "bells-and-whistles" like HDR effects, sacrificing their screen resolution to make up for the performance hit (especially given that a large number of gamers still use older monitors that can only display resolutions of up to 1280x1024 or 1600x1200). This isn't the case for all gamers, and many prefer higher resolutions and lower quality graphical settings; but for the purposes of this article we find this to be the best choice for testing.
Something to note is that many of these cards are clocked at the same reference speeds, so we will see several cards with identical numbers in our tests. Because we are dealing with so many cards, comparing performance between them all is somewhat daunting, but we hope to give the reader a good idea of how these cards rank in performance relative to each other for each of the games in the next sections.
This is the system we used for testing:
| Test Bed Components | |
| Motherboard: | NVIDIA nForce4 |
| Processor: | AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 2.6 GHz |
| Memory: | 2x1024MB OCZ 2-2-2-6 DDR-400 |
| Hard Drive: | Seagate 7200.7 120GB |
| Power Supply: | OCZ 600W PowerStream |
*Note that sound was disabled for testing. Testing was also performed in an open air environment rather than inside a case. This eliminated the need for a case fan, but it is not fully representative of how the various cards will run once placed inside a typical case. We will have a future article examining how the various silent cards perform inside a case, and depending on the case and cooling used overall temperatures may be lower or higher. As we stated in the introduction, we would advice some caution for those looking to build a fully silent computer. It is likely easier, cheaper, and more reliable to build a nearly-silent system by using a single low-RPM 120mm fan (perhaps with a voltage mod to further reduce fan speed) than to have an absolutely silent system that overheats under load.
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imaheadcase - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
I guess to each his own, i play bf2 on a 19inch CRT monitor at 1024x768. But even if i had a better card i would still prefer lower rez.DerekWilson - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
it's an issue of how games work on the inside ...all the objects, shapes, characters, and landscapes are there no matter how you see them. everything is mathematically represented in the software. rendered onto your display is a viewport into the world. this viewport only allows you to see a fixed grid of colors. the color of each pixel is determined by a bunch of factors, but the largest contribution is made by the object that projects onto a particular pixel.
... on second thought, this is too hard for me to explain with out a lot of math. lets look at it another way.
when there's a naked person on tv, they decrease the resolution of the area over the persons naughty bits. this makes it harder to see what's really there because there is a smaller number of large pixels that can only represent one color each. it follows, then, that it would also be harder to shoot the person acurately in said bits.
I think your preference may be based on your experience with performance at higher resolutions. Responsiveness is necessary for a quality experience in games like bf2. If you get a faster card, I would encourage you to at least try a higher resolution.
blckgrffn - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
When it is in stock at newegg, its ~$90, not nearly $140.Nat
mostlyprudent - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
I would be interested to know how much noise (quantitatively) an actively cooled 7600GS or 7600GT contributes to a system built in a relatively quiet case like an Antec P150. I am familiar with some of the leaf blowers attached to the higher end cards, but wonder how much overall system noise savings you'ld get in the mid-range cards.wilburpan - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
One obvious use for silent video cards would be in an HTPC system, where quiet performance would be a priority. Can't have those noisy computer fans intrude on watching Snakes on a Plane, you know. :@) Anyway, it would have been nice to include some video playback benchmarks to see how these cards can handle playing back a 1080p HDTV signal, or similiar tests.ViRGE - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
Since HDTV is MPEG2, any modern video card should be able to handle a 1080P signal(since this is an either/or case, it either can or can't). The limitations come in to H.264, where the video decode engine may not be clocked high enough to do higher resolution decoding. Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's any 1080 commerical/usable content that would work with Cyberlink/Intervideo's H.264 decoders(the only ones with GPU acceleration), since Quicktime content doesn't work in those.DerekWilson - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
with nvidia, the video decode engine is clocked off the core -- it actually will run better on a card with fewer pipelines and a higher core speed ... iow, the 7600gt is a better video decode graphics card than a 7900gt at default clock speeds.a little counter intuitive, but there it is.
nvidia 7 series parts with a core clock of >450 MHz should have no problem accelerating 1080p decode on players that support purevideo.
MontagGG - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
Which of these have HDCP?DerekWilson - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
to my knowledge, none of the cards tested here support hdcp. but I will certainly try to confirm this ...