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 | |||||||
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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 |