Test Setup And Benchmarks
Today’s story is going to be a little different than what you’ve seen from us in the past. The Radeon HD 7850 that AMD sent our US office was so unreliable that it wasn’t usable in a vast number of benchmarks. More on that when we break into the individual tests. AMD wasn’t able to get us a working replacement, so much of our performance data comes from Tom’s Hardware DE by way of Igor Wallosek. The result is that we have two different test systems.
| Tom's Hardware DE | Tom's Hardware US | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i7-2600K (Sandy Bridge), @ 4.5 GHz, Hyper-Threading enabled | Intel Core i7-3960X (Sandy Bridge-E), @ 3.6 GHz, Hyper-Threading enabled | ||||||
| Motherboard | Gigabyte Z68X-UD7 B3Socket 1155, Chipset: Intel Z68 | ASRock X79 Extreme9LGA 2011, Chipset: Intel X79 | ||||||
| Networking | On-Board Gigabit LAN controller | On-Board Gigabit LAN controller | ||||||
| Memory | Kingston HyperX, 2 x 4 GB, 1600 MT/s | Corsair Vengeance LP PC3-16000, 4 x 4 GB, 1600 MT/s, CL 8-8-8-24-2T | ||||||
| Graphics | AMD Radeon HD 6950800 MHz GPU, 1 GB GDDR5 at 1250 MHzAMD Radeon HD 6970880 MHz GPU, 2 GB GDDR5 at 1375 MHzAMD Radeon HD 7850860 MHz GPU, 2 GB GDDR5 at 1200 MHzAMD Radeon HD 78701000 MHz GPU, 2 GB GDDR5 at 1200 MHzAMD Radeon HD 7950800 MHz GPU, 3 GB GDDR5 at 1250 MHzNvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti822 MHz GPU, 1 GB GDDR5 at 1002 MHzNvidia GeForce GTX 570732 MHz GPU, 1.25 GB GDDR5 at 950 MHzNvidia GeForce GTX 580772 MHz GPU, 1.5 GB GDDR5 at 1002 MHz | |||||||
| Hard Drive | Kingston V100+ 256 GB (SSD) | Samsung 256 GB (SSD) | ||||||
| Power | ePower EP-1200E10-T2 1200 W ATX12V, EPS12V | ePower EP-1200E10-T2 1200 W ATX12V, EPS12V | ||||||
| Software and Drivers | ||||||||
| Operating System | Microsoft Windows 7 x6, Service Pack 1 | |||||||
| DirectX | DirectX 11 | |||||||
| Graphics Drivers | AMD Catalyst 12.3 beta | |||||||