All tests were conducted with the same PC setup:

• Motherboard: Asus M2N32 WS Pro Bios 1601 (Nvidia 590SLI AMD)
  
• Processor: AMD Athlon X2 4600+
• Case: Thermaltake Soprano
• Power Supply: OCZ GameXStream GXS600 SLI-Ready
• Memory: 2x1GB Crucial PC2-8000 (400MHz@ 4-4-4-8-2T)
• HDD: WD 200JB 7200RPM
• Monitor: Viewsonic 19" LCD VP930b (1280x1024 resolution)
• Windows XP SP2 with all the latest updates installed
• Windows VISTA 32bit with all the latest updates installed (+Nvidia suggested patches)
• DirectX November 2007
• ATI Catalyst v7.11

We enabled Adaptive Anti-aliasing to Quality, Mipmap Detail Level maxed out at High Quality, Catalyst AI to advanced, and left Anisotropic filtering/Anti-aliasing to "application decide" mode. We used several games and applications to evaluate a VGA card's performance, but we separate them into two categories:

DirectX 9

• 3D Mark 05 (v1.2.0)
• 3D Mark 06 (v1.1.0)
• F.E.A.R (v1.08)
• Prey (v1.2.0)
• Half Life 2: Episode 1
• Half Life 2: Episode 2
• Company Of Heroes (v1.7.1)
• Lost Planet: Extreme Condition DX9 Demo
• Unreal Tournament III Demo
• Crysis Demo

DirectX10

• Company Of Heroes (v1.7.1)
• Lost Planet: Extreme Condition DX10 Demo
• Crysis Demo
• Call Of Juarez DX10 Demo