Test System

ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 1Gb
GeForce 8800 Ultra 768Mb
GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB
GeForce 8800 GTS 512Mb
ARI Radeon HD 3870 512Mb

Asus P5E3 Deluxe
Intel QX9770 (3.2Ghz – 1600fsb)
2x1Gb Kingston DDR3-1600Mhz 7-7-7-20
Akasa 1000w PSU
Benq 16x DVD Writer
LG GBW-H10N Blu-Ray Writer
Xbox 360 HD-DVD Drive
Belkin Wireless-G PCI card
3x WD Raptor Hard Drives
1x Hitachi Deskstar
Arctic Cooling MX-2 Paste
Arctic Cooling Freezer
Windows Vista Ultimate
Forceware 169.28
Catalyst 8.451 230108
DirectX 9.0c/DirectX 10
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)
Blazing Angels 2 (DX 9)
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 was de-fragmented. For each test, the video drivers were set to default quality/optimizations (unless otherwise stated). 16x AF was enabled in the driver control panel. The ingame IQ screenshots are presented in lossless BMP format for image quality reasons, the downside being, they are considerably larger and will take longer to load.

Good Benchmarking Practice:
Where possible, each benchmark was performed three 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. We use real game play to determine our results.