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/Nvidia 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/Nvidia 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.