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The reference board: Almost every new product that comes to us arrives in a brown box, this wasn’t the case for the Radeon Xpress. Instead we received a rather nice Ruby based box…
…whilst it isn’t the most important thing in the world a nice box really does present a good first impression of a product. An impression that a company is putting as much effort into the product as possible and that the product is more ready for retail than something that arrives brown boxed. Inside the box was a poster for the product along with the all important hardware. Our box included: Poster
…oh and a Radeon Xpress Motherboard…
A great bundle I’m sure you will agree. We have added one component to the system for the purposes of our article, to make comparisons with our AGP test system possible we added a Sapphire X800 XT to the system and set it to PE speeds…
Before we look at the performance of the system there are a few things worth noting, the first is once again on presentation… the Radeon Xpress driver disc is provided in its retail form rather than a CDR as we would expect with most pre-release products. A further indication that the product is ready for retail availability… On the board layout front its well designed. Plenty of space is provided for component changes and working in the system. The floppy and IDE controllers are placed well so that you don’t have cables training down to the base of the system and the power connectors are nearer the top of the board and therefore near to most PSU’s. The memory arrangement is slightly different to most boards we have used. To get dual channel mode working the first 2 slots are paired as are the second two rather than 1+3/2+4. Finally there is adequate cooling provided by heatsinks on the relevant components and a fan on the X300 based chipset. So that’s all the required boxes ticked so far…
Test Software: Catalyst 8.07 beta
Good Benchmarking
Practice:
Next: System/CPU Tests
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