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.

Today we'll be checking out the GTX 580 in SLI against the GTX 580 when it's by itself. Apart from that, the only other single card setup we've included is the GTX 570 GLH Edition from Gainward that we looked at a few weeks back.

Of course, we're not just going to compare the setup to those two cards. We've included all the new HD 6000 series in Crossfire to see how these multi GPU setups fair. These include the HD 6970 in CF, HD 6950 in CF, HD 6870 in CF and HD 6850 in CF.

Before we start, though, we want to quickly fire up GPU-Z. We know that both cards follow the reference clocks, but we just want to double check that SLI is enabled.

As you can see across the bottom, both GPUs are enabled, which means it's time to get into the benchmarks and see what kind of performance we're able to squeeze out of the two fastest single GPU video cards on the market.

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 can see that the GTX 580 in SLI is indeed the fastest setup we've tested. It hasn't got huge gains over the HD 6970 CF setup, but the gains are clearly noticeable.