System Overview & Testing Procedures
We will be installing the HD 6850 into our new test system. This test system is comprised of an Intel Core i7 965, Gigabyte X58A-UD3R motherboard, 6GB of memory, 750GB SATA drive, Blu-ray drive, and Zalman ZM1000-HP 1000W power supply, all inside the BitFenix Colossus case. We will be comparing the HD 6850 to an HIS Radeon HD 5850 card.
Using GPU-Z if we take a look at both cards, you can see they are almost identical. The only real difference is the clock speed. The HD 5850 has a clock speed of 725MHz whereas the HD 6850 has a clock speed of 775MHz.
Before we get into the real testing let’s see what the temperatures look like on this card. Temperatures were recorded with GPU-Z. Idle and load states were taken an hour apart from each other.
We will be running 2 different types of tests on the card. The first are benchmarking programs, most of which you should be familiar with. The second part of the testing is actual game testing. The programs and games we are using are listed below as well as links where you can download or purchase them.
Video Tests
3DMark Vantage (download)
Heaven Demo 2.1 (download)
Stone Giant Demo (download)
Game Tests
Crysis Warehead (Buy)
Alien vs. Predator (Buy)
Resident Evil 5 (Buy)
DiRT 2 (Buy)
Now on to the testing!
