System Setup and Notes
With all the other hardware in HEXUS review dungeon cowering in fear, scared of the SCAN 3XS Chameleon's performance, drumming up parts for a HEXUS comparison system was harder than expected. So I borrowed the CPU out of the 3XS Chameleon and slid it into the usual HEXUS reference platform for graphics testing, along with a pair of stock clocked NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTXs and 1GiB of Corsair XMS3200XL. Pretty much what SCAN use, but without the overclocking. AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 is used in the HEXUS comparison system to provide the gaming scores.System Setup
| SCAN 3XS AMD Chameleon | HEXUS Comparison | |
|---|---|---|
| Processor | AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ 2.4GHz, 1MiB L2 cache, dual core 2760MHz |
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ 2.4GHz, 1MiB L2 cache, dual core 2400MHz AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 2.8GHz, 1MiB L2 cache, single core 2800MHz |
| Mainboard | ASUS A8N-SLI Premium | ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe |
| Memory | 2 x 512MiB DDR 2.5-4-4-8, 1T, 230MHz |
2 x 512MiB DDR 2-2-2-5, 1T, 200MHz |
| Graphics Cards | 2 x XFX GeForce 7800 GTX 490/650; PEG16X |
2 x NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 430/600; PEG16X |
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, SP2 | |
| Mainboard Software | NVIDIA Unified Platform Driver 6.66 | |
| Graphics Driver Software | NVIDIA ForceWare 77.76 | |
I made use of elements of the HEXUS workstation test suite due to the presence of two processor cores, with the gaming tests pitting the 3XS Chameleon's overclocked AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ against the single core Athlon 64 FX-57 instead. The basic aim is to see the performance gain to be had from the overclocked Athlon 64 X2 in multi-threaded applications, and to see if it's any faster than a stock A64 FX-57 in games.
As always, benchmarks were run three times and the median result reported. If any benchmark result was spurious in any way, all collected results were discarded for that benchmark and the test was rerun until consistent results were obtainable. If you have any question or queries about how we test, please visit the HEXUS.community.