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.

Our benchmark line-up is going to be identical to that of the MSI GTX 550 Ti 1GB Cyclone II. That means on the NVIDIA front we've got the GTX 460 and GTX 560 Ti while on the AMD front we've got the HD 5770.

We've also got the MSI GTX 550 Ti 1GB Cyclone II which carries with it a slightly lower clock speed, so it will be interesting to see how the performance of the Gainward compares to that.

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 that extra core and memory speed help separate the GTX 550 Ti from the reference HD 5770. You can see the MSI version was pretty much neck and neck with the HD 5770.