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.

Today we'll be comparing the GIGABYTE GTX 470 SOC against a number of other setups including the Gainward GTX 470 Golden Sample which carries with it a slightly higher memory clock, but only a 650MHz core. We've also got the GIGABYTE GTX 470, Sapphire HD 5970 along with the GTX 460 and GTX 470 SLI setups.

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.

Performance out the gate isn't bad; you can see compared to the GTX 480 the GTX 470 SOC performance at the P preset is very close. It lags a little at the higher end X preset, but not by a lot.