XFX 8800 GS XXX / Sapphire HD 3850

Test System

XFX 8800 GS XXX 384Mb Alpha Dog Edition
Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 256mb

Asus P5E3 Premium
Intel QX9770 (3.2Ghz – 1600fsb)
2x1Gb OCZ DDR3-1600Mhz 7-7-7-20
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
Forceware 169.32
Catalyst 8.1
DirectX 9.0c/DirectX 10
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 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.

Driver Heaven does not use benchmark scripts. We play the games for long periods of time on various levels and report any unusual findings we see. Then we record with FRAPS across several in game levels recording the averages. This is real world testing and is just how you guys will experience the game.  Occasionally we might throw in a time demo as a further comparison, but we will note it.