This is probably the most interesting segment where you can find out just how well these gaming rigs performed in our tests after reading about them in detail over the last few sections. Both Editor's Choice of Gaming Rigs were put through three of the most common benchmark tests - 3DMark05, Doom 3 and FarCry - which most gamers can relate to these scores quickly. All of the benchmarks were conducted with 4x FSAA (Full Scene Anti-Aliasing) and 8x AF (Anisotropic Filtering) only. With such high-end PCs, we're sure gamers will only concern themselves with performance of games at the highest quality settings. Here are the drivers and game versions used for the benchmarking segment:

Without further ado, here are the benchmark scores:

AMD FX RIG

Benchmark Scores of AMD FX RIG

Intel Extreme RIG

Benchmark Scores of Intel Extreme RIG (Single and SLI mode)

The HIS Radeon X850 XT outshined the Leadtek GeForce 6800 ULTRA, based on a single card solution for 3DMark05 and FarCry tests, but NVIDIA leads the way in Doom 3. As we all know, Doom 3 is built upon the OpenGL application programming interface and NVIDIA's drivers are well tuned for OpenGL performance, so it's no surprise that the Leadtek GeForce 6800 Ultra scored better than the HIS Radeon X850 XT. When we introduced two of Leadtek's GeForce 6800 ULTRAs in SLI mode against the HIS Radeon X850 XT, the situation changed drastically. At stock speeds, Leadtek's GeForce 6800 ULTRA in SLI mode was at least 1.5x faster than the HIS Radeon X850 XT in most situations.

NVIDIA's SLI technology is certainly impressive and effective to the extent that even the newly release GeForce 7800 GTX is unable to rival a pair of GeForce 6800 Ultra cards in SLI mode. While ATI isn't without their own dual card setup that goes by the name of CrossFire technology, it's not available yet for consumers. For those who would like to read up more on this technology option, check out our preview of CrossFire here.

To sum up the results, if you can spare only a single expansion slot and want to go the ATI way, the HIS Radeon X850 XT is the way to go. If you can spare more expansion slots, have an SLI capable system, and cost is not a concern, the dual GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics cards in SLI will deliver even greater performance. While the scores we have discussed upon thus far were based on the system defaults, our next section on the following page reveals the overclocked results from our Editor's Choice Gaming Rigs.

» Overclocking