Test System

Geforce 7800GTX 512mb reference design
(special thanks to Nvidia)
Sapphire Radeon X1800XT 512mb

Pentium 4 3.46ghz Extreme Edition CPU
2GB DDR2 667.
Abit A8W-Max
Samsung 80gb 7200rpm 8mb cache Sata Drive
Sony DWD 710A DVD writer
Enermax 520w PSU

Windows XP Sp2
.Net framework 1.1
Forceware 81.89
Catalyst 5.11 WHQL

F.E.A.R
Call of Duty 2
Quake 4
Need for Speed Underground 2
Fable
Half Life 2: Lost Coast
Counter Strike Source
Tiger Woods 2006

The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows XP was installed. Following the completion of the installation, the NV/ATI drivers were installed. The only updates applied were SP2 and .NET Framework 1.1(latest service pack). Next, the latest builds of the benchmarking tools were installed and finally, the hard drive was de-fragmented. For each test, the ATI/NV 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 games/applications had their latest patches applied.