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:

NVIDIA GTX650Ti BOOST 2GB GDDR5

NVIDIA GTX650Ti BOOST 2GB GDDR5 OC

GIGABYTE HD7790 1GB GDDR5
GIGABYTE GTX650 Ti 2GB GDDR5
AMD HD7770 1GB GDDR5
ZOTAC GTX660 2GB GDDR5
AMD HD7750 1GB GDDR5
MSI GTX560Ti-448 Twin Frozr III 1280MB GDDR5
MSI GTX560Ti-384 Twin Frozr III 2GB GDDR5



Benchmarks
Normally we would run the tests at four settings however at 2560x1600 both the GIGABYTE HD7790 and NVIDIA GTX650 Ti could not produce adequate (playable) frames per second at 2560x1600 so these tests were omitted as they served no purpose other than to state that 1920x1080 is the maximum resolution one could hope to utilise these two cards for.



Let's see how today's graphics card performed..