Test System Setup

Processor(s): Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.8GHz (190MHz x 20)
Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P (Supplied by Noctua)
Motherboard(s): GIGABYTE EX58-UD5 (Supplied by GIGABYTE)
Memory: 3 X 2GB Kingston Hyper X PC3-16000 2000MHz DDR CL9 (Supplied by Kingston)
Hard Disk(s): Western Digital 640GB SATA 2.0 HDD (Supplied by Western Digital)
Operating System: Windows 7
Drivers: ForceWare 195.55

With the cards being a bit slower than some of the more regular cards we test like the higher NVIDIA ones, we've made a few changes to our benchmark line-up. While we're still including all our new programs, we've chosen to only bench at 1680 x 1050.

This is the main resolution these cards are able to play at, so it seemed pointless to really test any higher. In saying that, we've left all our game presets the same which means they're between High and Maxed Out, depending on the game. We'll make a note when it comes to a game and how much lower we would need to go in detail level to smoothen out the frame rate if need be.

It probably also comes as no surprise that we've dropped our AA and AF tests for the exact same reasons as above. We've still got a fully loaded line-up including new games like Resident Evil 5 and Batman Arkham Asylum along with NVIDIAs own video converting tool, Badaboom.

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.

We can see the three stock clocked cards all perform very close to each other. The Galaxy offers us a little bit more performance with the extra bump in memory speed, while the Palit comes out on top thanks to its core and memory clocks being increased.