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.

We'll be looking at the 1GB HD 6950 in CrossFire against the 1GB by itself, the 2GB model in CrossFire, the HD 6970 in CrossFire and the new HD 6990. On the NVIDIA front we've got the GTX 580, GTX 560 in SLI and the GTX 580 again, but in SLI.

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 strong performance boost and between the 2GB models this one performs a little better, probably thanks to the more recent drivers.