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

Due to the fact we had to run the fan at 100% to get the card to complete a loop of 3DMark 11 fully at 1GHz we've just done a cut down version of our normal benchmark line up.

We've also cut some of the cards out in our comparisons today and chosen to just keep it to the highest end setups which include the GTX 580 in SLI, HD 6970 in CrossFire and the Sapphire HD 6990 4GB at its out of the box clocks.

Let's get started!

3DMark 11

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.0
Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com
Product Homepage: http://www.3dmark.com/3dmark11/
Buy It Here

3DMark 11 is the latest version of the world's most popular benchmark. Designed to measure your PC's gaming performance 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

Straight away we see a great boost in performance under 3DMark 11 which puts performance on par with the GTX 580 SLI setup at the P preset and a good chunk ahead of it at the higher resolution X Preset.