Testing Setup

The test system has been overclocked to 4.33GHz and should certainly eliminate any potential for the benchmarks to be CPU bound. You can find more specifics on the system via the CPU-Z. Additionally, we have supplied the GPU-Z screenshots so you can see the card specific details.

We ran each test at least three runs. The “average” which we report in each resolution and configuration is the geometric mean. We use it where possible for of all of the runs as to get a true center of the data. The minimum is the minimum of all of the runs. We would like to demonstrate user experiences as much as possible. While it does not play well for PR and marketing types, it is what we experienced and what a gamer would experience under the same conditions. Additionally, the three resolutions we selected are the two most popular and the maximum. We used a resolution of 1920x1080 for Unigine Heaven 2.1. If you have comments about the test setup or what you would like to see run through the paces, please contact us.

Nvidia Reference GeForce GTX 570

Nvidia Reference GeForce GTX 580

EVGA GeForce GTX 480

Asus EAH 6780

Asus EAH6850 DirectCU

AMD Reference Radeon HD 5870

AMD Reference Radeon HD 5850