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 our MSI GTX 580 Lightning Xtreme Edition 3GB at 980 / 5140MHz QDR against our reference GTX 580, GTX 560 Ti SLI setup and reference clocked GTX 590 when it comes to NVIDIA.

We've also got a bunch of AMD setups including, HD 6970, MSIs HD 6970 Lightning also overclocked, a pair of HD 6950s in CrossFire and a reference clocked HD 6990 just for good measure.

We had hoped we'd be able to compare the MSI GTX 580 Lightning Xtreme Edition against a 1.5GB GTX 580 at the same speeds, but truth be told, we just don't have a GTX 580 that was able to offer this kind of performance. Plus, why in the world would we want to do something boring like have it running at stock when we can have it running at these awesome speeds?!

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've just got some huge performance and you can see the setup is sitting on the edge of that GTX 560 Ti SLI setup that is running only a little bit faster. When it comes down to it, the dual GPU GTX 590 isn't really running that much faster when you consider it's indeed a dual GPU card.