Test Systems

System Setup

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800

ASUS P5B Deluxe WiFi-AP

2GB Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4

EVGA GeForce 7600 GS
EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTX
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX
Gigabyte GeForce 7900 GS
ForceWare 100.59 (for all GeForce cards under both versions of Vista)
ForceWare 97.92 (for GeForce 8800 GTX under WinXP

ForceWare 93.71 (for GeForce 7 cards under WinXP

300GB Western Digital Caviar SE

Windows XP Professional SP2
Windows XP Professional x64
Windows Vista Ultimate x86 (32-bit)
Windows Vista Ultimate x64

Benchmarks

Company of Heroes 1.3
F.E.A.R. 1.08
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Battlefield 2142 1.10
Call of Duty 2 1.3
Half-Life 2 Lost Coast (64-bit version when needed)

Notes

We were unable to test our Gigabyte GeForce 7900 GS board under 64-bit Windows Vista due to issues we ran into with nTune. You see, we underclocked the board to stock 7900 GS speeds using nTune and/or RivaTuner under the other operating systems, unfortunately however we couldn’t get either of these utilities to work under Vista x64.

We also ran our GeForce 7600 GS card under the same high graphics settings as the other cards. As you’ll see in the forthcoming benchmarks, those settings were definitely way too high for the card and as a result, we probably would have been better off swapping it out with a GeForce 8800 GTS instead. Oh well.