Test System Setup

Processor(s): Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 3GHz (333MHz x 9)

Cooling: Corsair Nautilus500 (Supplied by Corsair) with Arctic Cooling MX-2 Thermal Compound (Supplied by Arctic Cooling)

Motherboard(s): ASUS Blitz Extreme (Supplied by ASUS)

Memory: 2 X 1GB Corsair XMS3 DDR-3 1066MHz 7-7-7-21 (Supplied by Corsair)

Hard Disk(s): Hitachi 80GB 7200RPM SATA-2

Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2, Windows Vista

Drivers: Catalyst 7.10, Forceware 169.01, Forceware 169.06 (8800GTS 512MB)

With a whole ASUS lineup today we have the two GTS cards along with the 8800GT, and of course we mix things up a bit more with the 3870 too. We won't go into too much detail as we have a pretty standard affair as far as benchmarks and cards go.

3DMark05

Version and / or Patch Used: Build 130

Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com

Product Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmark05/

Buy It Here

3DMark05 is now the second latest version in the popular 3DMark "Gamers Benchmark" series. It includes a complete set of DX9 benchmarks which tests Shader Model 2.0 and above.

For more information on the 3DMark05 benchmark, we recommend you read our preview here.

We can see that the TOP model gives us a little boost in performance, nothing too exciting though. We can see that the gains when compared to the 8800GT are also quite small. 3DMark05 isn't the most intensive of applications these days so let's move on.