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.

Due to the nature of what we're testing today the benchmark line-up will be smaller than usual. What we'll be including are benchmarks in which only PhysX is used. We'll also be including the power draw of the setup.

What this means to our line-up is that 3DMark Vantage will be used along with Darkest of Days, Batman Arkham Asylum and Dark Void. Not the biggest benchmark line-up to date, but an interesting one none the less. As always, though, we'll be testing at all resolutions up to 2560 x 1600.

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.

In the X preset it's interesting that we saw no performance gains over the single HD 5970 TOXIC. With the clocks being slightly lower the score seemed to be slightly lower. In the Performance preset, though, we saw a significant boost of almost 5000 Marks which equates to an increase of more than 10% of the single card clocked slightly higher.