Test Systems

System Setup

AMD Athlon 64 FX-57

ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe (for NVIDIA cards)
ASUS A8R-MVP (for ATI cards)

2GB OCZ DDR400 SDRAM

ATI Radeon X1800 XL 256MB
ATI Radeon X1800 XT 512MB
ATI Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire Edition 512MB
CATALYST 5.12

NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT
Driver version ForceWare 81.95

250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache

Windows XP Professional SP1

DirectX 9.0c

Benchmarks

IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles
Half-Life 2
F.E.A.R.
Battlefield 2
Quake 4

Notes

We had to omit Call of Duty 2 for this round of tests. For some weird reason our NVIDIA-based system would lock up when loading levels if we ran the game’s DX9 rendering path; once we forced DX7 levels loaded regularly. We’ve run this combination of hardware/software in the past with no problems, so we’ll just chalk this one up to bad luck…