Our testing methods
We've narrowed our focus on the unique attributes each board vendor brings to their cards, so we won't be spending too much time detailing each GPU's gaming performance. Instead, we're going to toss up a few game tests to highlight the impact of factory overclocking and spend most of our time probing noise levels, power consumption, and operating temperatures.

If you'd like to get an idea of how the GeForce 8800 GT and Radeon HD 3800 series fare against each other and numerous other graphics cards across a much wider range of games and resolutions, be sure to check out our Radeon HD 3870 X2 review and our coverage of the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB.

Since Palit sent over a couple of its GeForce 8800 GTs, we've run them together in SLI and as a single card config. That should give us a quick frame of reference for how multi-GPU performance scaling can impact frame rates.

To make things easier to read, I've colored-coded the bars in most of our graphs according to GPU. Cards based on the GeForce 8800 GT are green, those built on the Radeon HD 3870 are red, and those equipped with the 3870 are yellow.

All tests were run three times, and their results were averaged.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

• Call of Duty 4 1.4
• Crysis 1.1

The test systems' Windows desktop was set at 1280x1024 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.