Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least twice, and the results were averaged.

Our test system was configured like so:

ProcessorAMD Athlon FX-51 2.2GHz
MotherboardMSI 9130
North bridgeK8T800
South bridgeVT8237
Chipset drivers4-in-1 v.4.49
AGP 4.42
BIOS revision1.0
Memory size1GB (2 DIMMs)
Memory typeInfineon PC2700 registered ECC DDR SDRAM at 400MHz
Hard driveSeagate Barracuda V 120GB SATA 150
AudioVT8237/ALC201A
OSMicrosoft Windows XP Professional
OS updatesService Pack 1, DirectX 9.0b

We used ATI's CATALYST 3.7 drivers (version 7.93) on the ATI cards, which is a full release driver that's been through Microsoft's WHQL certification. The NVIDIA 51.75 drivers are a beta release not available to the public.

Thanks to Corsair for providing us with memory for our testing. If you're looking to tweak out your system to the max and maybe overclock it a little, Corsair's RAM is definitely worth considering.

The test systems' Windows desktops were set at 1152x864 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

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