Asus 8800 GTS TOP 512Mb
Zotac 8800 GTS 512Mb
XFX GeForce 8800 GT 512Mb –XXX (670MHz C,  1650MHz S,   1950MHz M.)
Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 512Mb
ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512Mb
Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 512Mb

Asus Maximus Extreme
Intel QX9650 (3.0Ghz – 1333fsb)
2x1Gb OCZ DDR3-1333Mhz 7-7-7-20
Akasa 1000w PSU
Benq 16x DVD Writer
LG GBW-H10N Blu-Ray Writer
Xbox 360 HD-DVD Drive
Asus Xonar D2 Soundcard
Arctic Cooling MX-2 Paste
Arctic Cooling Freezer
Windows Vista Ultimate
Forceware 169.09/169.21
Catalyst 7.11
DirectX 9.0c/DirextX10
Call Of Duty 4 (DX9)
DiRT (DX9)
Quake Wars (OpenGL/MegaTexture)
Tiger Woods 08 (DX9)
Gears Of War (DX10)
Lost Planet (DX10)
Half-Life 2: Ep2 (DX9)
World In Conflict (DX10)
Crysis (DX10)
Oblivion (DX9)
Blazing Angels 2 (DX 9)
PowerDVD 7.3

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 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.