Driverheaven PCIe test system (special thanks to Intel / Ati / Corsair / OCZ)

Intel P4 3.4ghz Extreme Edition
2 gigabytes of Corsair DDR2 4x512
Intel 925X motherboard
2 x 36 gig Western Digital Raptor's Striped Raid.
X800XT PCIe 500/500
X700XT PCIe 475/525
OCZ Powerstream 470w Power Supply
Dell 2001FP 20 inch TFT Monitor/Illyama 22inch Vision Master Pro CRT.

The test setup had a fresh windows XP professional SP2 with all updates, all tests were ran 3 times to ensure no abnormalities could creep into the end results. Fraps2 was used in conjunction with custom built time demos as to replicate real world gaming conditions rather than a totally synthetic environment. For comparison purposes we used a X800XT for the bulk of the review, at a later date I will be comparing to Nvidia PCIe products.

As for the games on the list most people dont just play the newest titles and its important to see how a card like the X700XT will perform on yesterday's engines, so to get a good cross section of gaming titles ive mixed the old titles like Wolfenstein's Quake III engine with the hot new Farcry and Doom3 engines.

Driver:
A new driver supplied from ATI was used on both cards (8.06.4) - this has the new Catalyst AI feature and we have a detailed article on this over here. All testing was ran using standard AI.

"For those of you interested in specifics, Catalyst AI uses ATI's Texture Analyzer technology (R9600 Series and R4xx series) to optimize performance in any Game/3D application. ATI believe that whilst doing this they maintain the correct image quality and in some cases can even improve IQ. Cat AI does this by analyzing individual textures as they are loaded in order to choose the best and fastest way for them to be displayed. Settings available to the user are Off, Standard and Advanced. By default the drivers are set to Standard. In most cases Standard should be sufficient as it uses less CPU overhead than Advanced and its up to the end user to decide which option works best on their system in each particular game or application. There should be no IQ difference between the two settings however in games where there are frequent texture loads or when using a slower system the extra computations may cancel out the performance increases gained by using the Advanced algorithm."