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.

As we mentioned in our introduction, we're using three platforms today, four CPUs and a total of five configurations. For the most part our X58 and P55 platforms don't hold any surprises, as we've been using them for a long time now, especially the X58 one which does all my video card content.

The other platform is of course the P67 one. For the motherboard we've got the new ASRock P67 Extreme6 which you'll no doubt see a standalone review for in the near future, and on the CPU front we've got both the new i5 2500K and i7 2600K.

Our four CPUs will be tested at their stock speeds which are mentioned in the above image. Along with that, we've also tested our 980X at 4.2GHz which is our normal VGA testbed speed. As for P67 overclocking, don't fear, it's something we'll be looking at in the coming days under these benchmarks.

When it came to throwing all these platforms through the ringer, only one GPU came to mind and that was the MSI GTX 580 that we recently tested. While AMD had no doubt hoped that at the end of 2010 they would hold the fastest single GPU video card on the market, they were unfortunately mistaken and NVIDIA continue to reign supreme in this instance with the GTX 580.

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.

Looking at 3DMark 11, our first benchmark, we can see that the new chips do a good job of out pacing the P55 based i7 in the Performance preset. When we move to the X preset where we shift our focus almost away from the CPU and purely on the video card, you can see all the platforms perform quite close to each other.