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.

The line up here today is very similar to what you've seen in most of our HD 6990 coverage. We've got the HIS HD 6990 at the overclocked speed we achieved along with the Sapphire HD 6990 4GB in AUSUM mode and at the reference out of the box speeds.

We've also got a couple of CrossFire setups in the form of HD 6950 and HD 6970. For NVIDIA we've got their top single GPU card, the GTX 580, and two SLI setups; the GTX 560 Ti and the GTX 580.

Something that is really worth remembering today is that the GTX 580 SLI setup costs around the $1000 mark, while the single HD 6990 comes in at $699. That's quite a significant difference and while we're overclocking the HIS HD 6990 today, it's something you need to keep in mind.

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.

In our first test we see that in the performance preset the score is near identical to the GTX 580 SLI setup. In the higher resolution X preset, though, it's not near as close and you can see the HIS HD 6990 4GB has a nice jump on the GTX 580 SLI setup.