Test System

Intel Core2 QX6700 (2.66GHz)
Intel Core2 QX6850 (3.0GHz)
Intel Core2 X6800 (2.93GHz)
Intel Core2 E6750 (2.66GHz)

XFX 680i LT SLI

Patriot DDR2-1066 5-5-5-9
Asus Radeon HD 2900XT
Asetek Vapochill
Arctic Cooling MX2 Thermal Compound
WD Raptor 74 GB
Samsung 80Gb SATA Drive
BenQ 16x DVD Writer
Enermax Galaxy 850w PSU
Windows Vista Ultimate
Catalyst 7.6
Photoshop CS 3
Sisoft Sandra
PCMark05
Easy CD-DA Extractor 10
Lost Planet
Call Of Juarez
Oblivion
PowerDVD 7.3
Windows Media Encoder

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 Nvidia/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 Nvidia/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.