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.

We've included a number of setups which are all important to the setup we're looking at today. We've included the MSI GTX 460 768MB Cyclone cards in SLI at their default speed. We've also got the Gainward GTX 470 Golden Sample, GIGABYTE GTX 480 and our GTX 470 SLI Setup with the help of a Palit and Galaxy card.

It came as no surprise in our SLI testing that the GTX 460 SLI setup did lag behind the GTX 470 SLI one, but overclocking on the model has shown us some very impressive performance gains when compared to a single GTX 470. Hopefully we'll be able to knock off the GTX 470 SLI setup in a few places.

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.

Overclocked, the performance from the SLI setup is very strong. You can see we're only just behind that GTX 470 SLI setup which is a lot more expensive. This is only 3DMark Vantage, though; we'll have to see what happens when we begin to get into some real world games.