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 overclocked Sapphire HD 6870 1GB against a number of other cards with the main one being the AMD HD 6870 which is at the stock clocks. We've also got the stock clocked Sapphire HD 6850, and we've noted that it's the 1120 SP model.

We've also got the HD 5870 which as we know is still slightly faster than the new HD 6870. Just for good measure, we've also included the ECS Galaxy GTX 460 Black Edition which we've included in most of our HD 6800 content.

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 off the bat we see that Vantage gets a really nice boost in performance at both presets. Here we see it still lags behind the HD 5870, though.