3x
Asus VG236H
Corsair AX1200W PSU
Sony BDU-X10S Blu-Ray Drive
D-Link Wireless-N Dual Band USB Stick
1x
OCZ Agility 3 240GB SSD (OS)
1x
OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS SSD (SATA 3 Testing)
1x
OCZ Revodrive 3 X2 480GB (PCIe Testing)
1x
OCZ Enyo USB 3.0 (USB 3 Testing)
Arctic Cooling MX-4 Paste
Noctua NH-C14
Roccat Kone[+]
Razer BlackWidow Ultimate
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
Catalyst 11.10 Preview 2
DirectX 9.0c/DirectX 10/DirectX 11 (Nov 2010)
3DMark 11
PowerDVD 11 Ultra
Adobe Master Collection CS5.5
dBpoweramp
AIDA 64
Google Chrome
Cyberlink MediaExpresso 6.5
Flash 11
Sisoft Sandra
ATTO Disk Benchmark
Fraps
The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows 7 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 drives were de-fragmented. For each test, the video drivers were set to default quality/optimizations (unless otherwise stated).
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.
