Watford Aries 6435 system review

Let's get down to the nitty gritty performance then. How well does the system compare to our mid-range reference system?

The bit-tech Reference Rig - £600 Mid-range
Athlon 64 3500+ processor
DFI NForce4 Ultra D motherboard (non-SLI)
XFX GeForce 6600 Std 128MB graphics (non-GT)
Western Digital Caviar hard drive
1GB OCZ memory

RazorLame

To measure the raw horsepower of the system, we ripped a copy of 'Moby - Play' to the system hard drive, then encoded it into 192k MP3. The time shown is the time taken to encode.

SuperPi

Calculating pi with 2m iterations is another good test of overall system performance.

Sandra Unbuffered Memory

To test the system memory bandwidth and throughput, we ran the memory benchmark in Sandra 2005 with the options switched off to lead to an unbuffered benchmark.

Here, we can see that the system lacks a little of the brute force memory bandwidth of an NForce4 board setup. The OCZ memory we put in the reference system is also paying its dues here.

Doom3

For our game tests, we chose realistic settings that you might want to play on with this kind of hardware. We decided that a good mid-range system should be able to play games at 1024x768 resolution, with 2x Anti-Aliasing and 8x Anisotropic Filtering. In Doom3, we set the image quality to High.


The X700 loses here, partly due to the Doom3-oriented Nvidia architecture, and the 6600 in our reference rig.

CounterStrike Source: Stress Test

For this test, we ran the video stress test with all details set to max.


The X700 holds up to stiff competition here, delivering a totally playable framerate with excellent image quality.

Need For Speed: Underground 2

We used a lap of the demo track and used FRAPS to take the average framerate over a number of different run throughs.


Both mid-range systems take a total hammering here when all the details in-game are set to max. The amount of high-end DirectX 9 shaders in the title clearly tax mid-range cards. Nonetheless, with 2xAA switched off, the system delivers fluid gameplay higher in the 40's for the image quality sacrifice.

Overclocking

In our testing, we found that the RX480 motherboard had plenty of options for tweaking voltages and clock frequencies. Of course, the 3500+ chip is never going to be as good for overclocking as an FX-series chip, since the FX chips have unlocked multipliers. However, we found that the particular chip in the system was a pretty good overclocker, and whilst your results will vary, we managed an extra couple of hundred MHz out of it. The primary bottleneck overclocking was the memory, which really didn't want to play ball at faster bus speeds and lower timings. However, with some decent Corsair RAM, you could really tweak the heck out of this thing. The X700 Bravo is clocked up out of the box a little faster than other X700s. Whilst it gets hot with the passive cooler, we found there was an extra few MHz in there, and another few if you are prepared to turn the case cooling up to full power to drag air over the cooler.