1. Foreword. The First Impression.
2. Cooling System. Basic Components.
3. Design Quality Evaluation.
4. Setting Up and Overclocking.
5. Synthetical Tests (3DMark 2001SE and 2005).
6. Direct3D Games (Far Cry, Serious Sam 2).
7. OpenGL Games (Quake 4, Prey).
8. Advanced Anti-Aliasing.
9. Conclusions.

Far Cry and Serious Sam 2 have been chosen for our Direct3D benchmarking because they're popular enough, provide with documented capabilities to capture and play back demo records, and able to display both average and minimal FPS. These titles also support OpenGL rendering, but it's either buggy (Far Cry) or slow (Serious Sam 2). Both games utilise proprietary engines supporting SM3.0 which has been activated for all cards tested.
 

Far Cry
(click to enlarge, 112Kb and 154Kb respectively)

A popular demo record Training by Ubisoft has been chosen. It may be considered as consisting of two parts: inside the cave (short viewing range, low geometry level — 20 to 50 thousand polygons per frame) and outside on a run to the quay (long viewing range, average geometry level — 150 to 200 thousand polygons per frame). Both parts don't involve numerous lighting sources. All game settings have been set to Very High except of Water Quality which has been able to reach Ultra High and Shadow Quality which has got to be High.
 
Well, there are no results of Sapphire Radeon X1600 Pro. This video card has failed to render lighting sources properly, though reducing Lighting Quality to Low has made the trick. (update: this issue has been eliminated with the game patch v1.40)
 
So, BFG GeForce 7800GS OC has outperformed ASUS GeForce 6600GT Top once again, though the processor is the reason why it has been bound to 95-98 average FPS at 1024x768. Another limitation of 40-43 minimal FPS all over the modes is the processor's fault as well. Although ASUS GeForce 6600GT Top has got close to BFG GeForce 7800GS OC in the easiest mode (1024x768 TF noAA), the difference between them has grown to 46% in the hardest mode (1280x1024 16xAF 4xMSAA). Nevertheless, ASUS GeForce 6600GT Top has shown playable performance with an exception of too low minimal FPS in the hardest mode.
 

Serious Sam 2
(click to enlarge, 207Kb and 194Kb respectively)

The author has chosen the Branchester demo record by Croteam. This one demonstrates all power of the Serious Sam 2 engine: long wide-angle viewing range, large well-crafted textures, nice special effects. In general, texturing and rasterising play a key role for this demo record, though speed of advanced anisotropic filtering can also be well tested with it. All game options have been set to the highest possible, neither HDR nor Bloom have been enabled.
 
BFG GeForce 7800GS OC is far ahead of its competitors. It seems that Branchester isn't processor-dependent very much, so BFG GeForce 7800GS OC has faced some problems in the easiest mode only — the overclocking has delivered a modest increase of 4% in average FPS and nothing at all in minimal FPS. ASUS GeForce 6600GT Top has brought good performance through all the resolutions and modes. Nothing outstanding, but still playable. Sapphire Radeon X1600 Pro has delivered acceptable performance with trilinear filtering only. By the way, its performance decrease with 16x anisotropic filtering enabled has figured into about 40%. Not good at all.