System Overview & Testing Procedures
We will be installing the X480 into our new test system.  This test system is comprised of an Intel Core i7 965 Extreme, Gigabyte X58A-UD5 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 Sparkle Calibre X480 to the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850, HIS Radeon HD 5850 and Gigabyte GTS 450 video cards.  Keep in mind these other cards mid-range and low-end.  They are just here for reference.

Opening up GPU-Z we can see all the information on the X480.  Some things to note, this card is slightly overclocked running at 752MHz core (700MHz stock), 1536MB GDDR5 clocked at 3800MHz (3696MHz stock) and 1504MHz shaders (1401MHz stock).

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!