System Setup

System Setup

AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (2.8 GHz)
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (2.6GHz)

Intel Core 2 Extreme Edition X6800
Intel Core 2 Duo E6700

ASUS P5W DH Deluxe (975X)
MSI K9A Platinum (ATI Xpress 3200 AM2)

2GB Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C3

ATI Radeon X1950 XTX with CrossFire 6.10

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2

DirectX 9.0c

Dell XPS 710
ATI Radeon X1950 XTX with CrossFire 6.10
Windows Media Center Edition with Service Pack 2
2GB RAM
2x160GB Western Digital Raptor HDDs w/RAID 0, + 1x750GB HDD

Benchmarks

LAME MT MP3 Encoding (MS Compiler)
DivX Converter
3D Studio Max 8
Windows Media Encoder 9
3DMark06
F.E.A.R. 1.05
Pacific Fighters 4.04
Quake 4 1.2
Oblivion
SiSoft Sandra 2007
Call of Duty 1.3
Half-Life 2 Lost Coast
Cinebench 9.5

Notes

Note: Comparing the Dell to our standard Intel testbed platform is a little unfair to Dell, as the system is running a different OS and also a non-native graphics card (the system came by default with two GeForce 7950 GX2 cards, although it can be ordered with the X1950 XTX). Normally we like to wipe the drive clean when we install new hardware, but we didn’t have time to do that with the Dell. As a result, performance suffers slightly, but as you’ll see in the benchmarks, the Dell system still delivered excellent performance.