System Setup

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800

EVGA nForce 680i SLI motherboard
ASUS P5W DH Deluxe (for Radeon cards)

2GB Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4

ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB
ATI Radeon X1950 Pro
Catalyst 7.9

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT 256MB
ForceWare 163.69


300GB Western Digital Caviar SE

Windows XP Professional w/Service Pack 2
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit
Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit

Benchmarks

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars demo High Settings
BioShock 1.0 High Settings
STALKER 1.0004 w/Dynamic Lights
Company of Heroes 1.71 High Settings
Oblivion 1.2 w/HDR and High Quality Settings
FEAR 1.08 Maximum Settings

Notes

In our last Vista performance comparison article, we included Windows XP 32-bit and 64-bit results. To save time though we’re excluding Windows XP x64 Edition: in the previous article we found performance was similar between both versions of WinXP, and besides, the 64-bit OS never really took off for a variety of reasons.