XFX GeForce 9600 GSO 680M XXX Edition

How We Tested

As always, we did our best to deliver a clean set of benchmarks, with each test repeated three times and an average of those results is what we’re reporting here. In the rare case where performance was inconsistent, we continued repeating the test until we got three results that were consistent.

The tests performed are a mixture of custom in-game timedemos and manually played sections with FRAPs to record the average and minimum frame rates. We strive to not only record real-world performance you will actually see, but also present the results in a manner that is easy to digest.

Graphics cards tested

• XFX GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB 680M XXX Edition - operating at its default clock speeds of 680/1,700/1,900MHz using Forceware 177.92 beta
  
  
• AMD ATI Radeon HD 4670 512MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 750/2,000MHz using Catalyst beta 8.53-080805a-067874E-ATI
  
  
• Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 3870 512MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 775/2,250MHz using Catalyst 8.8 WHQL
  
  
• Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 3850 512MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 660/1,660MHz using Catalyst 8.8 WHQL
  
  
• BFG Tech GeForce 9600 GT 512MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 650/1,625/1,800MHz using Forceware 177.92 beta
  
  
• Asus EN8800GS/HTDP/384M - operating at its default clock speeds of 550/1,375/1,600MHz using Forceware 177.92 beta
  
  
• Inno3D Nvidia GeForce 9500 GT 512MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 550/1,400/1,600MHz using Forceware 177.92 beta

Common Components

Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 (operating at 3.00GHz – 9x333MHz); Gigabyte GA-X38-DS5 motherboard (Intel X38 Express); 2x 1GB OCZ FlexXLC PC-9200 memory (operating in dual-channel at DDR2-800 with 5-5-5-15-2T timings); Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160GB SATA hard drive; PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750W PSU; Windows Vista Home Premium x86-64; Intel inf 8.3.0 WHQL.

Games Tested

• Crysis, version 1.21 (64-bit) with DirectX 10 and DirectX 9.0
  
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, version 1.6 with DirectX 9.0
  
• Half-Life 2: Episode Two, with DirectX 9.0
  
• Race Driver: GRID, version 1.1 with DirectX 9.0