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 MSI GTX 580 Lightning @ 930MHz / 4600MHz QDR against the reference MSI GTX 580, Palit GTX 560 Ti in SLI and ASUS GTX 590. For AMD we've got the reference HD 6970, HD 6950 2GB in CF and HD 6990.

We've also included the MSI HD 6970 Lightning @ 1015MHz / 6260MHz QDR. These are much higher numbers than the NVIDIA GTX 580 Lightning we're looking at today, but as we know speed isn't always just about the clocks that are on offer, so it will be interesting to see how this Lightning card goes against that one.

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 fire up 3DMark 11 and we've got some very good performance; a very good increase over the reference GTX 580 and you can see the card has no problems convincingly holding on to top single GPU honors.