Test Setup

Corsair DDR3-1800 7-7-7-20
OCZ DDR3-1300 7-7-7-20
Asus P5K3 Deluxe
Patriot DDR2-1066 5-5-5-9
XFX 680i-LT
Intel QX6850 (3.0Ghz – 1333fsb)
AMD/ATI Radeon HD 2900XT 512mb

Enermax Galaxy 850w
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
Catalyst 7.8
DirectX 9.0c/DirextX10
CPU-Z 1.41

Sisoft Sandra
Photoshop CS3
Counter Strike: Source
Call of Juarez
PowerDVD 7.3
Easy CD-DA Converter

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 AMD 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 AMD 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.

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