Test System

2 x 1 GB OCZ DDR3-1800 Platinum
2 x 1 GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1800
Asus P5E3 Premium
Intel QX9770 @ 3.4Ghz – 1800fsb
Akasa 1000w PSU
Benq 16x DVD Writer
LG GBW-H10N Blu-Ray Writer
Xbox 360 HD-DVD Drive
Belkin Wireless-G PCI card
3x WD Raptor Hard Drives
1x Hitachi Deskstar
Arctic Cooling MX-2 Paste
Arctic Cooling Freezer
Windows Vista Ultimate
Catalyst 8.451 230108
DirectX 9.0c/DirectX 10
PowerDVD 7.3
Sisoft Sandra
PCMark Vantage
Photoshop CS3
ConvertXtoDVD
Easy CD-DA Converter
Windows Media Player 11
CCCP Jan 08

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).

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.