Adequately testing the performance of next generation video cards requires that we use a system that presents the video cards with as little bottleneck as possible. For this reason we chose to use the Core 2 Extreme X6800, currently the fastest dual-core CPU that can be bought. We chose to use this processor over the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 because it is able to perform faster in games because of its higher clock speed of 2.93 GHz. The Core 2 Extreme QX6700 doesn’t get all cores 4 completely taken advantage of during games, and so it is simply treated as a 2.67 GHz dual-core processor. In light of this, the Core 2 Extreme X6800 turned out to be the more preferable solution for our tests.

The motherboard we chose for our test platform was the Abit AW9D-Max, which is an LGA Socket 775 solution based on the Intel 975X chipset. The system ran with 2 GB of Corsair XPS CM2X1024-6400C3 memory which operate at timings of 3-4-3-9 at a clock frequency of 800 MHz. The hard disk used for the system was a 160 GB Western Digital Caviar WD1600JS which uses an SATA interface and spins at a speed of 7200 Rounds Per Minute (RPM).

For SLI tests we used an EVGA nForce 680i SLI motherboard, based on the NVIDIA nForce 680i chipset. For Crossfire configurations we used the Abit AW9D-Max motherboard.

The test platform’s operating system was Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2, loaded with all updates as of Octboer 2006. The NVIDIA drivers we used for the testing was Forceware 96.94 while for ATI products we used Catalyst 6.10 drivers. Our SLI tests did not use Forceware 96.94 tests, but instead they used Forceware 97.02. To maintain consistency with our previous reviews, we chose to not use the latest drivers available for download by ATI or NVIDIA. The reason behind this is that both companies are currently focused on optimizing their drivers for Windows Vista. NVIDIA and ATI’s most recent Windows XP drivers, on the other hand, have been focused on increasing the compatibility of their video cards with high-definition movie formats. As this is not the focus of today’s we review, we chose to use the older drivers.

The Dell 3007WFP display

One thing we always stress that is a fundamental point of any high-end video card review is the display. There is not much reason to buy a $500 video card if it will only be running low resolutions. For this reason, we bought the largest display we could find for this review so as to test the high-end video cards at extreme resolutions. The Dell 3007WFP is by far one of the largest LCD displays currently available for purchase, and supports a native maximum resolution of 2560x1600.

To effectively stress the video subsystem and to push the video cards to their limits, the lowest resolution we use in this review is 1600x1200. In addition, piling an even larger load on the video cards, anisotropic filtering does not ever get set under 16x. Again, this choice is influenced by our desire to push these video cards to their maximum.

We will be comparing the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 video cards against the NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2, NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX, and ATI Radeon X1950XTX. The 7950 GX2 was chosen because it is currently the fastest single-card solution, the GeForce 7900 GTX is NVIDIA’s previous top of the range video card solution, and the Radeion X1950 XTX is currently AMD/ATI’s direct contender to the GeForce 8800 series until the R600 finally makes its appearance.