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This card provided some real entertainment to see it run through our rigorous benchmarks. We expected big things from this beast and there was some disappointment with its performance. We ran this card on our main test bench. This bench features the Gigabyte G1 Assassin motherboard and we have it running with a stock Intel Core i7 980 extreme processor. We have a Thermaltake SpinQ CPU heat sink cooling our Intel processor and have 12 gigs of Kingston Hyper X memory installed. This system is being powered by a Sapphire 1250 watt modular power supply. This rig is meant to give this card all the headroom it needs with minimal bottlenecking.
What I first need to explain is that this isn’t the average system that most consumers would have, but this also isn’t the average video card either. We try to give a best case scenario when testing our hardware so that you can have a better understanding of the maximum performance you can expect from your hardware. This card was able to crush every other card that we’ve ever tested. That really shouldn’t be a shock for a card that retails for about 1400 dollars. We were hoping for better performance though due to the price of the card. Asus has marketed this as not just a performance card, but also as a collector’s item. I feel that this is why the price is so high for this card. If you were to purchase this card for its performance alone, you really would be paying way too much for it. This really is meant for the extreme enthusiast that wants the bragging rights that come with it.
