Test System And Benchmarks
Our charts list the graphics cards based on their retail prices, from the most expensive configuration on the top to the cheapest on the bottom. Our testing involves a number of graphics cards from many manufacturers, so we are setting all of the clock speeds to reference levels to keep things on an even playing field.
There is one testing configuration that we have to simulate: two Radeon HD 5850 cards in CrossFire. We only received a single Radeon HD 5850 in time for testing, so we’re pairing the card with a Radeon HD 5870. AMD has confirmed that the superior card will be crippled when these models are paired in CrossFire, resulting in Radeon HD 5850-class specifications, using 1440 of its 1600 stream processors and 72 of its 80 texture units.
We've set the clocks of both cards to Radeon HD 5850 reference speeds; the resulting performance should be exactly the same as two of these cards in CrossFire. The results show the performance exactly where we would expect a Radeon HD 5850 CrossFire configuration to be relative to the Radeon HD 5830 and Radeon HD 5870.
| Header Cell - Column 0 | Test System |
|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i7-920 (Nehalem), 2.67 GHz, QPI-4200, 8 MB CacheOverclocked to 3.61 GHz @ 172 MHz BCLK |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte X58A-UD3R Intel X58, BIOS version FA |
| Networking | Onboard Gigabit LAN controller |
| Memory | Mushkin PC3-10700H 3x 2048 MB, DDR3-1376, CL 10-10-10-25-1T |
| Graphics | Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 Reference1536 MB GDDR5Zotac GeForce GTX 480 AMP! Edition1536 MB GDDR5HIS HD 5870 iCooler V Turbo XRadeon HD 5870, 1 GB GDDR5 Gigabyte GV-R587SO-1GDRadeon HD 5870, 1 GB GDDR5MSI GeForce GTX 4701280 MB GDDR5Gigabyte GV-N470SO-13IGeForce GTX 470, 1280 MB GDDR5Gigabyte GV-R585OC-1GDRadeon HD 5850, 1 GB GDDR5AMD Radeon HD 5830 Reference1 GB GDDR52x Gigabyte GV-N460OC-1GIGeForce GTX 460, 1 GB GDDR5(all clock rates have been set to reference specifications for the purpose of benchmarking) |
| Hard Drive | Western Digital Caviar WD50 00AAJS-00YFA, 500 GB, 7200 RPM, 8 MB cache, SATA 3.0Gb/s |
| Power | Thermaltake Toughpower 1200 W1200 W, ATX 12V 2.2, EPS 12v 2.91 |
| Software and Drivers | |
| Operating System | Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
| DirectX version | DirectX 11 |
| Graphics Drivers | AMD Catalyst 10.7 Beta, Nvidia GeForce Driver 258.96 WHQL |