september 11 2010 review by tweaktown

The people of ECS have chosen to bump the core from 675MHz to 765MHz and the memory from 3600MHz QDR to 3700MHz QDR, quite a 'large' factory overclock.

Conclusion:

Great cooling, a high out of the box overclock and an interesting price make this card an ideal cadidate for gamers and overclockers. The massive cooler of this card is a cut above the crowd when it comes to performance. The factory overclock, is higher than most other cards on the market and the passive cooler really helps achieve a high overclock while keeping the card cool, overclockers will like this feature. The SLI connector is an extra long one, so despite the massive cooler you'll still be able to have an SLI or CrossFire setup. The cooler is so big that it takes three slots, so while SLI is still an option, this card is ultimately for the person who just wants to run a single card unless you have a big case and a full size motherboard.

Test Setup:

• CPU cooler Noctua-NH-U12P 2x fan
• CPU: Intel Core i7-980X
• Mainboard: ASRock X58 Extreme-3
• Memory: 6GB Kingston HyperX 2000MHz DDR3 PC16000
• OS: W7 Ultimate x64
• PSU: Corsair AX1200
• SSD: Kingston SSDNow V+128GB

Benchmarks:

Benchmarks: Fan Noise, PhysX Tests, Mafia 2, Far Cry 2, H.A.W.X, Overall Performance, Power Consumption, Total Value, Badaboom, Batman: Arkham Aslyum, BattleForge, Company Of Heroes, Dark void, Darkest of Days, High Quality AA and AF, Resident Evil V, Sound Test, Temperature Test.

Overclocking:

Yhe GPU core was OCed @ 930MHz core and the memory @ 4200MHz.

Compared To:

This card was not compared to other graphics cards, instead it was compared to its own overclocking results.