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We've had a pretty reliable and pretty stable test bench system churning out video card reviews for quite some time now. We've had other platforms in the past, and don't often object to using something a little different every once in a while. Personally, I really like this test system. The parts we've slammed together are as follows.

• AMD Athlon 64 3700+ processor
• Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe mother board 
• 2 x 512 MB OCZ Platinum PC4800 memory
• FSP Epsilon FX700-GLN power supply
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 SATA hard drive
• Samsung WriteMaster DVD burner
• Windows XP Professional SP2

An adequate ... decent ... perhaps even stellar gaming rig, if I ever saw one. The hardware used may not be on that bleeding edge of technological savvy, but we've found this configuration to give us stable performance and trusted results. And oh boy, are we going to put this rig to the test. I've got six, count 'em, six video cards to benchmark. The Sapphire X1650 Pro will be having its first run ever, while the other five cards were pulled from various other test rigs and from the far reaches of our cluttered hardware shelves. Here's what we've got to play with.

Sapphire X1600 Pro     Sapphire X1650 Pro     Sapphire X1800 GTO

BFG GeForce 7600 GT OC     Sapphire X1600XT Ultimate     BFG GeForce 7600 GS OC 

That's quite a clutch of cards to behold. It carries both those sporting an NVIDIA chip and an ATI chip. I would safely say that these cards, each and every one of them, provide a nice cross section slice of what one might consider when shopping around for a mid range card. I have my work cut our for me, testing all of these beasts. I can see long days of slamming in cards, and even longer nights of running benchmarks. As for what we use to test our cards, here's our plan of attack.

• 3DMark06
• Call of Duty 2
• Doom 3
• Half Life 2
• Far Cry
• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
• F.E.A.R.
• Prey

Just in case you're wondering, Prey is our latest and greatest video benchmarking tool. I had picked up the game one evening wandering the local mall, simply in the hopes that it would make a good testing tool. And I was right. But before we get to the results, there is the consideration of drivers. There were some complications with one ATI card in particular, but those were resolved in due time. We used the latest available drivers for both the ATI and NVIDIA competitors:

• ATI CATALYST 6.8
• NVIDIA ForceWare 91.47

On to the testing!