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): 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)

Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2, Windows Vista SP1

Drivers: Catalyst 8.5, Forceware 175.16

What we will do today is check out our silent 9600GT up against the silent HD 3870 from Sapphire, along with a stock clocked 9600GT from Albatron for good measure.

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 the heavy overclock putting it ahead of the other cards we have here today.