Test Setup and Extra Info

Test Setup

Stefan's Test Setup
CPU	Core i7 920 @ 3.2Ghz
Cooling	Cogage True Spirit
Mainboard	Asrock X58 Extreme
Memory	G.Skill F3-12800CL8T-6GBPI PI Series
VGA	AXLE GeForce 210 512MB DDR2 Gainward Geforce GTS 250 Deep Green Gainward Geforce GT240 Inno3D Geforce GT240 Sparkle Geforce GTS 250 LP ATI Radeon HD 4550 ATI Radeon HD 4890 ATI Radeon HD 5770 ATI Radeon HD 5830 ATI Radeon HD 5450 Sparkle Geforce GTX 470
Other	Power Supply : Antec True Power New 750W HDD : Seagate Barracuda 320GB 7200.10 Case : Cooler Master HAF922 Case with 2 NB-Multiframe S-Series MF12-S3HS@1800RPM on the side

With the help of the GPU-Z 0.4.4 utility, we can extract lots of information regarding the video card clocks,memory type, pixel and texture fill rate and so on:



I have used the Everest Ultimate Edition utility to find out the ATI PowerPlay pre-defined clocks and some more information regarding the GPU Code name, Part Number or BIOS Version:



To find out the IDLE and maximum temperatures, I have used the Furmark utility, with the Stability Test in “Xtreme Burning mode” and let it run for about 15 minutes. To record the temperatures, the GPU-Z utility was used, thanks to its Sensors monitoring tab. The recorded room temperature at the time of testing was 25.8 degrees Celsius:

IDLE



Full Load



After the 15 minutes have passed, the fan barely reached 49% and the cooling system remained at very decent sound levels; this tells us that the Sparkle cooling system can successfully cool the hot GTX 470.

Fan speeds



The Sparkle DVD comes with the drivers on it, the Adobe Reader 9 kit for people that do not have it and its needed to read the Quick Install Guide in electronic format, along with the Troubleshooting Guide; on the bottom of the Autorun menu, we can see that we can install the Design Garage, Supersonic Sled or Video Easy bundled applications:



Design Garage is a tech demo with incredible graphics that allows us to choose the car and scenery and create beauty-shots:



Supersonic Sled is another tech demo that uses PhysX, CUDA, DirectX 11. The demo straps a guy on a high powered test rocket and hurtles him down a six-mile long track in the Nevada desert, at speeds in excess of 800 miles an hour:




MAGIX Video Easy is the first video editing program for the whole family. It's so easy to use that even beginners without any prior skills will be able to design breathtaking videos in just a short time. Transform recordings of family celebrations, vacations, or special events into video DVDs or present your videos on the Internet with ease.



The 3DMark Vantage scores were calculated by summing up the GPU and CPU subscores.

Here are the Vantage subscores separately: