Protein-protein recognition is an important step in biological processes, which still largely remains elusive.The inter-residue contact potential, CPij, describes the propensity of contact between two types of residue.In this study, several different CPij variants were examined with the objective of discriminating the binding potential of surface pairs.Using solvent mediated inter-molecule contact potential (SM-IMCPij), an evaluation model was deduced and tested.Using the evaluation model it was found that the SM-IMCPij gives a better performance than either residue mediated IMCPij(RM-IMCPij) or folding-residue contact potential (FCPij).The results suggest that the evaluation model provides a fast, effective, and discriminative method for the evaluation of proposed binding interfaces.