The Almost Titan: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Review

At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate as possible. Our testing is rigorous and time-consuming, but we feel the effort is worth it. In an attempt to leave no question unanswered, this page contains not only our testbed specifications, but also a detailed look at how we conduct our testing.

Test Machine

The below table lists our testing machine’s hardware, which remains unchanged throughout all GPU testing, minus the graphics card. Each card used for comparison is also listed here, along with the driver version used.

When preparing our testbeds for any type of performance testing, we follow these guidelines:

General Guidelines

• No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard’s BIOS.
• No virus scanner or firewall is installed.
• The OS is kept clean; no scrap files are left in between runs.
• Machine has proper airflow and the room temperature is 80°F (27°C) or less.

To aide with the goal of keeping accurate and repeatable results, we alter certain services in Windows 7 from starting up at boot. This is due to the fact that these services have the tendency to start up in the background without notice, potentially causing inaccurate test results. For example, disabling “Windows Search” turns off the OS’ indexing which can at times utilize the hard drive and memory more than we’d like.

The services we disable are:

• Windows Defender
• Windows Firewall
• Windows Search
• Windows Update

Battlefield 3

DiRT: Showdown

Metro 2033

Sleeping Dogs

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Total War: SHOGUN 2