System Setups

To get a broad perspective of performance, we ran our benchmarks on a mid-range and high-end system based on competing platforms. We hope this will provide a nice overall image of the kind of performance that is available in Windows 7 beta. For simplicities sake, we kept our testing at two common and popular resolutions, 1680x1050 and 1920x1080. All our 3D tests were also run with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering enabled. 3DMark Vantage tests were run using the ‘High’ preset, which utilizes a 1680x1050 resolution with 2xAA. Both systems were run under stock speeds, to ensure we were getting as accurate results as possible.

Mid-Range

AMD Athlon X2 5000+ Black Edition
Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DS5
2GB OCZ Reaper DDR2 OCZ2RPR8002GK
EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB
nVidia ForceWare 181.20
Seagate 320GB 7200RPM SATAII ST303204N1A1AS-RK

High-End

Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition
Asus P6T Deluxe
3GB Kingston HyperX KHX14400D3K3/3GX
HIS ATI Radeon 4870X2 2GB
ATI Catalyst 8.12
Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB 10,000RPM SATAII WD3000GLFS


2GB OCZ Diesel OCZUSBDSL2G Flash Drive
Windows XP Professional SP3
Windows Vista 64-bit SP1
Windows 7 Beta