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.

It's been a while since we've only tested higher end cards with mid range ones dominating the sample pool lately. Combined with the fact that we've also just recently upgraded the testbed, we don't have a whole lot of cards at the moment.

With that said, we've tested the standard GTX 480 from GIGABYTE and we've also got the HD 5870. Further to that, we've included the GTS 450 SLI setup from Galaxy we tested recently which brought with it some good performance and good value. It'll be interesting to see how the GTX 480 goes against it.

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.

Straight away in our first test we can see that the GTX 480 Super OC from Galaxy offers us a nice boost in performance in both the P and the X preset. Thanks to the PhysX support, we also see the card doesn't have any trouble dealing with the HD 5870 in this case.