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.

Being a new year, we've made a few little changes to our line-up with the games we test. Of course, we've added 3DMark 11 which will begin to hold more and more weight as time goes on. While it's not the best judge of how a card will perform across all areas, it does help give us a quick general idea of how it compares to other models. We also find that NVIDIA and AMD tend to concentrate a bit on the 3DMark benchmark, so it's always nice to see some gains there.

We've changed the game line-up a little as well, but nothing major, and nothing that you wouldn't have already seen in our standard video card reviews. Of course, the big thing to change, though, is the cards we're testing. We've of course kept the HD 5000 series representation present with the HD 5870, but we've officially added both the HD 6870 and HD 6970 now that they're both supported in the latest driver.

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.

HD 6970 - Here we see no real change.

HD 6870 - Here we see no real change.

HD 5970 - Here we see no real change.