Old Hand Meets Young Firebrand: ATi FireGL X1 and Nvidia Quadro4 980XGL

I850/ RDRAM V. E7205/ DDR: The Right Chipset Makes All The Difference

To begin with, we couldn't wait to get our hands on the E7205/ Granite Bay chipset, since its AGP8X support makes it the ideal candidate for the new workstation graphics cards. Although the good old i850/ Tehama chipset for RDRAM only offers AGP4X, it is still quicker as long as a real-world application such as 3D Studio Max is used. By the way, here, too, both benchmark systems were equipped with 1024 MB memory. All other components, such as graphics cards, etc., are identical. We were able to reproduce similar contexts with other application-based OpenGL benchmarks.

Once again, it's not enough to quickly run the synthetic Viewperf. If you did, you might assume that the E7205 with DDR266 memory is scarcely slower than the i850 with RDRAM.