Here's a list of the parts used for our test setup.

 

Processor Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 (3GHz, 12MB L2) @ 4GHz
Motherboard ASUS P5E3 Premium (Intel X48 Express)
Memory Corsair Dominator 2GB 1800MHz DDR3 Kit
Graphics Cards / Drivers NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB (600/1300/2200MHz) - 177.34
XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 1GB (600/1500/2000MHz) - 175.16
Cooler Scythe Zipang
Storage Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA x 2
Power Supply Enermax Galaxy 1000W
Operating System Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit w/ SP1

 

 

 

 

Benchmarking notes

Futuremark 3DMark Vantage - Two sets of tests were run on 3DMark Vantage. The first is the 'standard' Performance preset, followed by the highest option available, the Extreme preset. The latest 3DMark Vantage version was used for this review.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars - Testing was carried out at three resolutions of 1680 x 1050 (on 22-inch widescreens), 1920 x 1200 (on 24-inchers) and card-killing 2560 x 1600 (on 30-inchers). Quality was set to the highest available of High.

Crysis - The same three resolution settings were used for Crysis. Game quality was set to either completely High or completely Very High. No AA or forced AF was used.

World in Conflict - Game quality was set at High and Very High. The differences are the level of AA/AF as well as some extra eye-candy processing. On a side note, Medium triggers DX9 rendering instead of DX10.

Unreal Tournament 3 - Processing was set to Intense, while we forced 4x AA and 16x AF from the NVIDIA Control Panel. We did not test without AA/AF as we found out that we were bottlenecked by our processor instead. UT3Bench was used for this test, and all imaging options were set to the highest available (level 5).