Samsung SyncMaster XL30
BFG EX-1200W PSU
Sony BDU-X10S Blu-Ray drive
D-Link Wireless N Dual Band USB stick
1x
128GB Indilinx based SSD for OS (May 2010 Firmware)
2x WD Raptor Hard Drives (Games on RAID 0 Drives)
Arctic MX-4 Paste
Corsair H50
Razer Megalodon
Razer Deathadder
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Forceware 257.21
SiSoft Sandra 2010 SP2
Crystal DiskMark
Blackmagic Disk Benchmark
IOMeter 2008
Crysis: Warhead
The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drives 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 where required. For each test, the video drivers were set to default quality/optimizations (unless otherwise stated) and each drive was Sanitary Erased between tests.
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.
