Test System

ATI Radeon AIW X1800XL 256mb
ATI Radeon AIW X1900 256mb

Intel Pentium 4 3.73Ghz EE
Intel 925XE Motherboard
2x512mb DDR2 PC5300
Hitachi Deskstar 80gb 7200rpm 8mb cache SATA drive
NEC ND2510A DVD Writer

Windows XP SP2
.Net FW 1.1 sp1
Catalyst WHQL
Intel Chipset driver 7 series
Intel onboard audio driver
MMC 9.13

Tiger Woods 2006, FEAR, Quake 4, Black and White 2, Fable

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 Intel/ATI 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 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.