- TweakTown Test System Setup

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

Motherboard(s): GIGABYTE X48-DQ6 (Supplied by GIGABYTE)

Memory: 2 X 1GB Kingston PC6400 DDR-2 3-3-3-10 (KHX6400D2ULK2/2G) (Supplied by Kingston)

Hard Disk(s): Seagate 250GB 7200RPM SATA-2 7200.10 (Supplied by Seagate)

Graphics Card(s): Sapphire HD 4870 (Supplied by Sapphire)

- Smooth Creations Test System Setup

Processor(s): Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650

Motherboard(s): Foxconn P45-A

Memory: 2 X 2GB G.Skill MQ 6-6-6-18

Hard Disk(s): Western Digital Raptor 150GB

Graphics Card(s): Diamond HD 4870 XOC Black Edition

Operating System: Windows Vista SP1

Drivers: Catalyst 8.7

What we'll be doing today is having a look at the Smooth Creations Asylum against our humble TweakTown testbed, which is always running at a solid 3GHz. To keep it fair, we've installed a Sapphire HD 4870 into our test system.

We'll be running the normal line-up of Vista tests along with a few extra tests that let us know the performance of the hard drive, CPU and RAM. Without further ado, let's just get stuck straight into it.

3DMark06

Version and / or Patch Used: Build 110

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

Product Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmark06/

Buy It Here

3DMark06 is the worldwide standard in advanced 3D game performance benchmarking. A fundamental tool for every company in the PC industry as well as PC users and gamers, 3DMark06 uses advanced real-time 3D game workloads to measure PC performance using a suite of DirectX 9 3D graphics tests, CPU tests, and 3D feature tests.

3DMark06 tests include all new HDR/SM3.0 graphics tests, SM2.0 graphics tests, AI and physics driven single and multiple cores or processor CPU tests and a collection of comprehensive feature tests to reliably measure next generation gaming performance today.

Straight away we can see that the SC system gets a good jump on our testbed. Overclocking the processor to 3.9GHz really yields a massive performance increase as well.