System Set-Up and Software Used

Intel EU for the supply of the 3.3GHz 3960X 2nd Generation  Intel® Core™ i7  Processor, Intel Mainboard DX79SI and the new Intel® Liquid Cooling High Performance solution

AMD® for the Supply of the AMD FirePro® V7900 professional graphic card

NVIDIA® for the supply of the Quadro® 4000 professional graphic card and Geforce GTX 580 Multimedia graphic card

Sapphire Technology® Radeon HD 6970 Multimedia graphic card

Akasa EU for the supply of the PSU, Venom Voodoo Heatsink Fan and last but not least the new Venom Toxic Chassis

With the support and help of all the companies involved. It gives you the reader a choice on upgrade paths that many of you look for here with the performance ratio’s the system has to provide

Systems Integrators, OEM’s and VAR’s should contact all companies directly for pricing and availability of all components. Members of the public should contact their respective suppliers requesting the parts directly. One main e-tailer that can supply the EU reader readily all the parts listed you should pop over to SCAN and see what todays best bottom dollar deal is on the main parts listed.

In order to test all the parts we have broken down the results to case specific pages. Therefore one will see result pages for the system and each of the graphics cards listed. Each card performs differently and taking into account the generation gap in some areas it is unethical to pitch them head to head.

The plethora of benchmarks available in this arena; one could spend all day in producing results if the time permitted, paralysis by analysis! In order to make this a factual hard hitting article we looked carefully at what the community really need to see as timescales ran against us in providing you with more information. Therefore we chose the following to highlight just how good the new complete architecture really is in all arenas. In order to expedite the proceedings, all tests shown within are at their primary display default settings.  The system mainboard was left at default with the only exception of bios intrusion was to manually adjust the memory settings up to 1600MHz.

Benchmarks and Software Used 64-bit Mode

Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
SiSoftware Sandra 2011 (Latest Build)
POV-Ray for Windows v3.7 RC3 (64-bit)
PCMark 2007 Professional Edition
PCMark Vantage
3DMark 2011
Unigine Heaven Benchmark Ver. 2.5
Cinebench 11.5 64-bit
Bentley MicroStation
Redway Turbine Benchmark
SPECapc for 3ds Max™ 2011
SPECapcSM for Maya 2009
SPECapc for SolidWorks 2007™
SPECviewperf® 11.0 64-bit

Each set of tests has been applied on the clean system hard drives shown above to ensure that no residue drivers were left installed with all updates/patches applied. A test/render has been completed many times over different periods of the system uptime. Whilst maintaining the fair play rules of SPEC® HyperThreading and Turbo Boost have been enabled. Tests have been conducted in accordance with the resolutions detailed above @ 59Hz / 60Hz in 32 bit colour. Results that have been shown within this article are from the application/benchmarks first run in accordance with the SPECviewperf® and SPECapc™ fair play rules. Not an average of 3 runs as some seem prudent to think that this is correct.