Test System

AMD Phenom 9700
Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DQ6
2xATI Radeon HD 3850
Akasa 1000w PSU
LG GBW-H10N Blu-Ray Writer
Xbox 360 HD-DVD Drive
Arctic Cooling MX-2 Paste
Arctic Cooling Freezer 64
Windows Vista Ultimate
Catalyst 7.11
DirectX 9.0c/DirextX10
CPU-Z 1.42

Sisoft Sandra
Photoshop CS3
PCMarkVantage
Counter Strike: Source
Lost Planet
PowerDVD 7.3
Easy CD-DA Converter
ConvertXtoDVD

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 chipset, video and sound 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).

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.