Test System

Palit 7950GT 512Mb
ATI Radeon X1900XT 512Mb
ATI Radeon X1900GT 256Mb

Intel Core2 X6800 2.93Ghz
Intel D975XBX
2Gb Corsair DDR2-8500 @ DDR2-800 (4-4-4-12)
WD Raptor 74Gb 10000rpm 8mb Cache Sata Drive
Sony DWD22a DVDRW drive
Enermax 600w Noisetaker PSU
Viewsonic 23” Widescreen LCD

Windows XP SP2
.Net FW 2.0
Catalyst 6.8 WHQL
Forceware 91.47 WHQL

F.E.A.R.
Prey
Half Life 2 – Ep1
Oblivion
Tomb Raider Legend
GTR2
PowerDVD 7

The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows XP was installed. Following the completion of the installation, the ATI/Nvidia drivers were installed. The only updates applied were SP2 and .NET Framework 2.0 (latest service pack). Next, the latest builds of the benchmarking tools were installed and finally, the hard drive was de-fragmented. For each test, the ATI/Nvidia 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 games/applications had their latest patches applied.