Test System

Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 @ 2.66Ghz
Zalman CNPS9500A LED
2 x 1 GB OCZ PC2-8500 @ DDR2-800 4-4-4-12
GIGABYTE HD2600Pro
Tagan 650W
Windows Vista Ultimate
Catalyst 7.11 (Vista)
Photoshop CS 3
Sisoft Sandra
PCMark Vantage
Easy CD-DA Extractor 10
Supreme Commander

The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Vista was installed. Following the completion of the installation, the AMD drivers were installed. All Windows updates were applied. Next, the latest builds of the benchmarking tools were installed and finally, the hard drive was de-fragmented. For each test, the AMD 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.