Test System

Uberclok Reactor:
Thermaltake 1200w Toughpower PSU
Intel Core2 E6850 (3.0GHz @ 3.7GHz)
2x1Gb Corsair DDR2-800 Dominator
EVGA Nforce 680I Motherboard
2x EVGA GeForce 8800 Ultra 768Mb Graphics Cards
Creative X-FI Extreme Gamer Sound Card
Tuniq Tower CPU Cooler
Seagate 500Gb 7200RPM Sata Drive 16Mb Cache
3x12cm Antec Fans (2 front, 1 rear)
1x20cm Antec Fan (Top)
Antec Gamer 900 Case
1x DVD Rom - Sata
1x DVD-RW - Sata
1x Floppy/Memory Card Reader
DH Components:
LG GBW-H10N Blu-Ray Writer
Xbox 360 HD-DVD Drive


Windows Vista Ultimate
Forceware 169.04
DirectX 9.0c/DirextX10
CPU-Z 1.41

Sisoft Sandra
Photoshop CS3
PCMark05
PowerDVD 7.3
Easy CD-DA Converter
Crysis
Unreal Tournament 3
Call of Duty 4
Call of Juarez
Colin McRae Dirt
Quake Wars

The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows Vista/XP were 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.