Test System:

ECS 945g-M3
Intel D945GTP

Intel Pentium D 820
2x512mb DDR2-667 (5-4-4-8)
ATI Radeon X1800XL

Windows XP Pro +SP2
DirectX 9.0c (Feb 2006)
Catalyst 6.4

PCmark 2005
Sisoft Sandra
Sonic MyDVD v6.1
FEAR
Photoshop CS2
ATI Avivo Converter
Windows Media Player 10
Quake 4
PowerDVD 6

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 ATI drivers were installed. The only updates applied were SP2 and .NET Framework 1.1(latest service pack) and the latest Media Player version and Patches. Next, the latest builds of the benchmarking tools were installed and finally, the hard drive was de-fragmented. For each test, the ATI 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.