Test System

XFX GeForce 8800 GT 512mb -XXX
Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 512Mb
Asus Radeon EAH3870 512Mb

Asus Maximus Extreme
Intel QX9850 (3.0Ghz – 1333fsb)
2x1Gb OCZ DDR3-1333Mhz 7-7-7-20
Akasa 1000w PSU
Benq 16x DVD Writer
LG GBW-H10N Blu-Ray Writer
Xbox 360 HD-DVD Drive
Asus Xonar D2 Soundcard
Arctic Cooling MX-2 Paste
Arctic Cooling Freezer
Windows Vista Ultimate
Forceware 169.09
Catalyst 8.43-1
DirectX 9.0c/DirextX10
Call Of Duty 4 (DX9)
DiRT (DX9)
Quake Wars (OpenGL/MegaTexture)
Tiger Woods 08 (DX9)
Gears Of War (DX10)
Lost Planet (DX10)
Half-Life 2: Ep2 (DX9)
World In Conflict (DX10)
Crysis (DX10)
Oblivion (DX9)
PowerDVD 7.3

The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows Vista was installed. Following the completion of the installation, the video drivers were installed. All windows updates were then installed as were the latest builds of the benchmarking tools. Finally, the hard drive waim nots de-fragmented. For each test, the video drivers were set to default quality/optimizations (unless otherwise stated).

Good Benchmarking Practice:
Where possible, each benchmark was performed 3 times and the median result for each resolution/setting is shown in the tables that will follow. All applications had their latest patches applied and all hardware features the latest BIOS/Firmware.

High Resolution Images:
For the purposes of this review Driver Heaven has used BMP format for game screenshots and configuration screens. Unlike JPG, BMP images do not display any compression related artifacting. The downside is, they are larger and will take longer to display.