Red vs Green vs Blue - The Test Rigs

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To make the test as fair as possible, I bought exactly the same CPU (Intel i5-2500K) and RAM (G-Skill 8GB Dual channel DDR3-1600 RipjawsX). At the time I built my Eyefinity rig, I was not planning on doing this, so I did not consider SLI compatibility. So for my Nvidia rig, I tried to spec the motherboard as close as possible with what was available to me (ASUS P8P67 Pro V3 B3 Stepping vs ASUS P8Z68-V-GEN3). I just wanted to make sure I had dual channel 8x PCI for SLI support.

Both i5-2500Ks were overclocked using the ASUS advanced graphical BIOS from the stock speed of 3.3GHz up to 4.0GHz on the stock cooler. Both rigs have 850W power supplies and Windows 7 Home 64-bit installed. All background programs were turned off (as far as I could tell) to reduce variables. Both rigs were connected to my 3 x 1680x1050 16:10 DVI monitors, Logitech G15 Keyboard and G5 mouse. Both rigs benchmarked the same so I was satisfied that I had parity for this exercise.

So now I had my two test rig base setups sorted, it was time to look at graphical hardware.

A8


This article has been superseded by Red vs Green vs Blue V2! Please refer to Version 2 for the latest information available.