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We really threw everything at this card to see how well it would perform. We used both 3D Mark Vantage and 3D Mark 11 to stress this card. We also used the Aliens vs. Predator benchmark, and the notorious Unigine Heaven benchmark to put this card through its paces.
What we discovered is that this card performs exceptionally well for its price point. This card retails for just under 500 dollars. That’s a lot less than either the GTX 590 or the AMD HD 6990. Dollar for dollar this card outperformed both of them. In fact, this is the fastest single GPU card that we’ve currently tested. It easily beat the AMD HD 6970 in all but 3 of our tests. In two of those tests the difference was very small. In the Alien vs. Predator benchmark the HD 6970 did beat this card by over 20 frames per second on average. This particular benchmark does favor the AMD cards a little bit more than NVIDIA.
Now the truth is that an HD 6970 is quite a bit cheaper than this card. An HD 6970 costs about 370 dollars right now and this card comes in at about 130 dollars more. So the question is does this card perform well enough to be worth the difference? To answer that question you should take a look at the games that you’re currently playing. If you only play Aliens vs. Predator then the answer is clearly no. If you play many other current titles that feature NVIDIA’s PhysX technology, then you will be much better off by spending the extra money on this card. In our testing this card remained fairly quiet and didn’t get all that hot either. I do recommend that you should have a case with adequate air-flow to keep this card cool.
