We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: Intel, ASRock, Kingston, Western Digital, Noctua and Thermaltake.

This month we've added Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. to the benchmark line-up as ATI has promised some nice performance improvements.

We've also gone through a testbed upgrade which now contains a beautiful ASRock X58 Extreme3 and Intel i7-980X Extreme processor. For now it's clocked at the same 3.8GHz as our i7 920, but it will be heading further north later in the month.

For now, we'll see how the new and old driver sets are performing on our new testbed and hope that we can see the performance jump that ATI say is here.

Let's get started!

3DMark Vantage

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.0.1
Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com
Product Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmarkvantage/
Buy It Here

3DMark Vantage is the new industry standard PC gaming performance benchmark from Futuremark, newly designed for Windows Vista and DirectX10. It includes two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, and support for the latest hardware.

3DMark Vantage is based on a completely new rendering engine, developed specifically to take full advantage of DirectX10, the new graphics API from Microsoft.

HD 5770 - In both presets we can see a nice bump in performance.

HD 5850 - In both presets we can see a nice bump in performance.

HD 5870 - In both presets we can see a nice bump in performance.

HD 5970 - In both presets we can see a nice bump in performance.