With the latest Intel chipset release we decided to update our ageing X58 setup to the new X79 chipset. Not only that but we will be using the flagship Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to 4.5GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB of ram on board there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card's performance.


Some of the components for our test bench were kindly donated by CORSAIR who provided the majority of components without whom we would not have been able to bring you this review so a big thanks to them.

Graphics cards on test:

KFA2 GTX680 2048MB GDDR5
AMD HD7970 3072MB GDDR5

For this review we will be using the previous refresh of NVIDIA drivers due to the decision NVIDIA made in disabling PCIe Gen 3 in their latest driver set for X79. While there are advantages to both driver sets, we are comparing like for like today so as AMD drivers are PCIe 3.0 compatible, we didn't want to confuse matters by using PCIe 2.0 with the NVIDIA setup. The AMD drivers used today will be the CAT 12.3 drivers.



Benchmarks
We have also updated our range of benchmarks to include the following games which will give the graphics cards a challenge and sort the wheat from the chaff. Each benchmark will be run at both stock and maximum overclock settings and utilise 1920x1080 and 2560x1600 resolutions along with AA at various levels (application dependent):



Let's see how today's cards performed...