GT test system

Knowing that the GT is not aimed at enthusiasts we decided to scale our testing rig accordingly. We made some non-standard choices though. The most important one was the decision to have 2Gb of memory installed instead of just one. We wanted the tests to be accurate enough for a middle-end gaming system, yet at the same time we didn’t want disk swapping to affect our results.

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 @ 1.86Ghz
Motherboard: Asus P5N-E SLI
Audio: Onboard audio chip – Realtek High Definition Audio
Memory: 2 x 1 GB OCZ Gold 677Mhz DDR2 memory
Graphics cards: XFX 8600GT XXX – Forceware 158.14 (Vista) and 158.16 (XP)
Operating systems used: Windows Vista Ultimate and Windows XP Professional, both fully updated

Software:
Oblivion
Supreme Commander
Call of Duty 2
Tomb Raider Legend
Half Life 2: Episode 1

The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows Vista and Windows XP were installed. Following the completion of the installations, the Nvidia drivers were installed on both operating systems. All windows updates were then installed as were the latest builds of the benchmarking tools. Finally, the hard drive was de-fragmented. For each test, the 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 applications had their latest patches applied and all hardware features the latest BIOS/Firmware.