Beyond the synthetic benchmarks of the 3DMark06 suite, they perform a series of real-life game tests to uncover any weaknesses in the graphics card. The game titles include Call of Duty 4, Crysis, Lost Planet, and many others. One run through is set with no anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering, while the second run has 4x AA and 16x AF enabled. Some games did not have these options and were run on the highest settings. They also ran power draw and thermal tests. The crew at pconline.com.cn did an excellent job of covering this hardware.

Unlike the 9600GT test bed, this one has a considerable increase in computing power. The load these high-end cards lay on a computer is massive, and they made the right choice. The processor utilized is a Core 2 Duo QX6850, which runs at 400x9 or 3.6GHz (OC). The system has two gigabytes of PNY DDR2-1066, with timings of 5-5-5-15. These components rest in a Gigabyte DQ6 with the X48 chipset. Seagate handles storage with the 7200.10 SATA 320GB hard drive. They use Windows Vista Ultimate edition for the OS and the latest NVIDIA beta driver ver.169.25 for the 8800 Ultra. The review team implements AMD Catalyst 8.1 Vista for the HD 3870X2. Finally, the video cards plug into a Samsung T-305 display device. (30" @ 2560x1600)

ATi won in 13 out of the 17 tests. However, ATi has yet to optimize their driver for the R680, and it is obvious. What is more obvious is that the HD 3870X2 thoroughly outperforms the 8800 Ultra on many levels. There were areas where the ATi card outperformed NVIDIA by as much as 77%. The favoring of architectures, such as Lost Planet, won a few for NVIDIA, but most of the losses were attributed to the ATi drivers. ATi also had the best performance per watt numbers.