Introduction

Test System

Test System CPU: Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.8 GHz

(Bloomfield, 8192 KB Cache) Motherboard: Gigabyte X58 Extreme

Intel X58 & ICH10R Memory: 3x 2048 MB Mushkin Redline XP3-12800 DDR3

@ 1520 MHz 8-7-7-16 Harddisk: WD Caviar Black 6401AALS 640 GB Power Supply: akasa 1200W Software: Windows 7 64-bit / No SP and SP1 Drivers: NVIDIA: 266.58

ATI: Catalyst 11.2 Display: LG Flatron W3000H 30" 2560x1600



Benchmark scores in other reviews are only comparable when this exact same configuration is used.

All video card results were obtained on this exact system with the exact same configuration.

All games were set to their highest quality setting

1024 x 768, No Anti-aliasing. This is a standard resolution without demanding display settings.

1280 x 1024, 2x Anti-aliasing. Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens today (17" - 19"). A bit of eye candy turned on in the drivers.

1680 x 1050, 4x Anti-aliasing. Most common widescreen resolution on larger displays (19" - 22"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.

1920 x 1200, 4x Anti-aliasing. Typical widescreen resolution for large displays (22" - 26"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.

2560 x 1600, 4x Anti-aliasing. Highest possible resolution for commonly available displays (30"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.

Today Microsoft released the first service pack for their Windows 7 operating system to the general public.Officially Microsoft's release notes suggest no changes that would have any effect on graphics card performance, but we wanted to do our own testing. We used the final version of Service Pack 1 on our graphics card review system and compared the performance of ATI's and NVIDIA's latest flagship graphics card in our extensive benchmark suite.Each benchmark was tested at the following settings and resolution: