Test System

ATI Radeon X1950XT 512Mb
ATI Radeon X1900XT 512Mb
BFG 7900GTX OC 512Mb
Nvidia 7950GX2 1Gb

Intel Core 2 X6800
Intel D975XBX
Dell 3007WFP 30" Widescreen LCD Monitor
2Gb Corsair DDR2-8500 @ DDR2-800 (4-4-4-12)
WD Raptor 74Gb 10000rpm 8mb Cache Sata Drive
Asetek Vapochill LS
Sony DWD22a DVDRW drive
Enermax 600w Noisetaker PSU
Samsung 244T LCD for Wide-screen
Philips 202P73 for High Res Gaming
AOC 19” CRT for 1600x1200 + 1280x960

Windows XP SP2
.Net FW 2.0
Catalyst 6.8 WHQL
Forceware 91.31 WHQL

F.E.A.R.
Prey
Half Life 2 – Ep1
Oblivion
Tomb Raider Legend
Flight Simulator X (Demo)
GTR 2 (Demo)
PowerDVD 7

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 Nvidia/ATI drivers were installed. The only updates applied were SP2 and .NET Framework 2.0 (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 Nvidia/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 games/applications had their latest patches applied.