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 7.11, Forceware 169.09

The biggest competition to the 3870 is the 8800GT, so what we've done is slapped one of them into our benchmark line-up alongside a standard run of the mill 3870 from ASUS. All we can do is hit the benchmark button and see what happens.

The line-up is all very standard, we will run the three cards through a number of synthetic and real world games across different resolutions on Vista and XP. By the end of it we will see if there's a difference to these fancy MOSFETs and what not, or if it's all just marketing.

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.

In our first of many benchmarks we can see that all three cards practically sit on top of each other with nothing really separating them.