Test System

Sapphire Atomic Radeon HD 3870 512Mb
Reference ATI Radeon HD 3870 512Mb
Asus Maximus Extreme
Intel QX9850 (3.0Ghz – 1333fsb)
2x1Gb OCZ DDR3-1333Mhz 7-7-7-20
Akasa 1000w PSU
Benq 16x DVD Writer
LG GBW-H10N Blu-Ray Writer
Xbox 360 HD-DVD Drive
Auzentech X-Meridian 7.1 Soundcard
Arctic Cooling MX-2 Paste
Arctic Cooling Freezer
Windows Vista Ultimate
Forceware 169.25
Catalyst 7.12
DirectX 9.0c/DirectX10
DiRT
Gears Of War
Half-Life 2: Episode 2
Bioshock
Tiger Woods 08
Oblivion
World In Conflict
PowerDVD Ultra

The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows Vista was installed. Following the completion of the installation, the video drivers were installed. 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 video drivers were set to default quality/optimizations (unless otherwise stated). For quality reasons, screenshots of the games are presented in BMP format. These will take considerably longer to download if you are on a slow connection.

Good Benchmarking Practice:
Where possible, each benchmark was performed three 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.