Okay, here is another one of my gpu comparisons just for you guys. It's pretty much a full comprehensive review of all the gpu's I could think one would upgrade to, and I hope it helps in answering a lot of questions.

Now, it's not going to be one of those lame-o stock reviews that still has you wondering about total possible performance. I will be overclocking the living piss out of these cards on the stock coolers in the most relative games I can think. I do want you to understand a couple of variables that one may encounter with my tests:

- Overclock ability from one card to the next is not identical so your frequencies will vary based on silicon quality, ambient temperatures, and cooling capacity. Again, my overclocks do not represent the maximum possible overclock for every card.

- For games that I will need to utilize fraps due to the lack of in-game benchmark the result with be slightly different. Keep in mind it's always useful to apply a certain margin of error. I usually leave around 2 percent or so before claiming any significance in power differences. Your will belief will vary from mine.

Now that we have that out of the way I'll let you get a little more intimate with the competition.

ATI

ASUS 5970



MSI 5870 Lightening



HIS 5850 Reference



MSI 5770 Hawks (Crossfire)




nVidia

ASUS GTX480



PNY GTX470



ASUS GTX465




As you can tell some of them are reference and some of them are not so also keep that in mind when overclocks are concerned. But enough about that and let me go into detail concerning the actual reason for this thread.

The test system will include:



Intel i7 980x (4.61GHz HT Off)
Corsair Dominator GTX2's
EVGA 4-Way Classified X58
Enermax EVO 1250W
Separated Win7 Installs to factor out driver conflicts
Samsung 2493HM - its a 1920x1200 Capable but will run tests at 1080p

Games/Benchmarks:

3DMark03
3DMark05
3DMark06
3DMark Vantage
Battlefield Bad Company 2 (fraps)
Metro 2033 (Maxed w/o Physx and fraps)
Street Fighter 4
Resident Evil 5 (Fixed Benchmark)
FarCry 2
Crysis (unmodded)
Dirt 2
Hawx (10.1 enabled)
Just Cause 2 - Desert Sunrise & Concrete Jungle
Left4Dead 2
Counter-Strike:Source
Stone Giant
Heaven 2.0 (Normal Tessellation Only)

Those will be the tests that I will be utilizing that I have at my disposal. Now this will be suicidal overclocks on the stock gpu and my only requirement to assure overclock stability is that I must complete each benchmark at the same overclock. Therefore, if a clock can run on one bench and not the other I have to run the benchmark that passes at a higher frequency lower. This is to ensure consistency in the tests.