NVIDIA have completely blown away their previous generation GPU's with the introduction of the GTX 5xx line up and while they are 'good enough' at stock speeds, it's normal for AIB partners to push these GPU's to their limits. MSI have tweaked the GeForce GTX 560Ti to 950MHz GPU / 1050MHz Memory, given it the 'Hawk' moniker, slapped on a Twin Frozr III cooler and sent it out into the wild to show the world what it is made of. Price wise the MSI N560GTX-Ti Hawk will obviously set you back more than a reference GTX 560Ti but in return it delivers stellar performance and excellent cooling capability. Benchmark Reviews aims to provide you with an unbiased review of the MSI N560GTX-Ti Hawk and report back our findings, keeping you informed on the latest technologies available on the market today.

Lucid (formerly LucidLogix) appeared on the enthusiast horizon with their "Hydra" technology, which purported to enable vendor-agnostic multi-GPU systems. Users would be able to combine the performance of different video cards from different vendors, rather than being constrained to the cards required by ATI CrossFireX or NVIDIA SLI. Hydra didn't work as well as had been hoped, but the introduction of Intel's new Z68 chipset came with an announcement that Intel had licensed Lucid's "Virtu" GPU virtualization technology. This brings significant new features to Z68 motherboards, and Benchmark Reviews will examine them in this article.

Designed around their flagship GeForce GTX 580 video card, they've combined two titanic graphics processors into a package roughly the same size, and still manage to produce the quietest dual-GPU video card ever made. With 512 CUDA cores each, two independent NVIDIA GF110 GPUs join to deliver 1024 total cores of graphical processing power. There are six 64-bit memory controllers that offer 384-bit combined bandwidth per GPU, and feed 3GB of combined GDDR5 video frame buffer. All of this is said to deliver comparable performance to the Radeon HD 6990, which is good for gamers, but it does so while using less power and emitting less noise. In this article, Benchmark Reviews tests the GeForce GTX 590 against the AMD Radeon HD 6990 and an entire market of top-end desktop graphics solutions.

AMD's new Radeon HD 6990 video card reclaims the top spot in their overall GPU product hierarchy. There is no single-GPU card that can compete with two Cayman-class Radeon HD 6870 processors running in tandem. This was also true for the prior generation's king, the HD 5970, and at first glance the 6990 looks like a one-for-one replacement, but is it? Not really; it's better, or I should say it's more better. The PowerColor Radeon HD 6990 takes a slightly different tack, as the full complement of shaders (1536) is always available from each GPU. There is a BIOS switch that unlocks the core clock and the GPU voltage for the more adventurous among us. Normally that kind of enhancement-on-a-switch might seem a bit ho-hum, but with the power of 5.3 billion transistors on board, there are physical limits that must be respected. Heat and power go hand in hand, and some say it's folly to try and pack this much power into a single package. It's better to have two cooling systems, and two slots, and two sets of PCI-E power connectors to spread the load, they claim. They may be right; we'll just have to test it and see... Follow along with Benchmark Reviews as we put the new PowerColor AX6990 4GBD5-M4D to the test.

AMD is a company that partners with many different brands, but among them Sapphire is the most recognizable. Known for their legendary Atomic series of factory overclocked video cards, they now offer the Radeon HD 6990 to join the ranks of elite graphics cards. The Sapphire 100310SR Radeon HD 6990 is a dual-Cayman GPU product capable of powering five monitors at once, or produce the fastest video game frame rates possible of any graphics card to one monitor. Using a new VLIW4 shader core architecture and equipped with 4GB GDDR5 256-bit video frame buffer and 3072 stream processors. While the Sapphire 100310SR Radeon HD 6990 can accomplish the performance of two Radeon HD 6970's in CrossFireX, it can do so with less power and heat. The Sapphire 100310SR utilizes several new MSAA modes including Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing (EQAA), which Benchmark Reviews tests in some of the most popular DirectX-11 video games available...

NVIDIA have completely blown away their previous generation GPU's with the introduction of the GTX 5xx line up and now it is the turn of the GTX550-Ti to show the world what it is made of. Rumours of the specifications suggesting the GTX550-Ti is just an overclocked GTS 450 have been around for a while now but all the details have not quite been correct. The MSI N550GTX-Ti Cyclone II OC video card looks a whole lot like its predecessor but as we have seen with the previous 5xx video cards the revised GF11x GPU easily out performs its counterpart. Also working in the favor of the GTX550-Ti is the 192-bit wide memory interface giving MSI N550GTX-Ti Cyclone II OC video card 103.2GB/s memory bandwidth, which is closer to the GTX460 than the GTS450. Price wise the GTX550-Ti will fit in just nicely between the GTX460 and GTS450 and also the Radeon HD5570, so let's find out where it fits performance wise. Benchmark Reviews aims to provide you with an unbiased review of the MSI N550GTS-Ti Cyclone II OC and report back our findings, keeping you informed on the latest technologies available on the market today.

If you're an enthusiast gamer who demands only the highest level of performance that far surpasses mainstream standards, then it's your lucky day because the AMD Radeon HD 6990, code named Antilles, was designed to do exactly that. Using a new VLIW4 shader core architecture and equipped with 4GB GDDR5 256-bit video frame buffer, dual Cayman GPUs offer a total of 3072 stream processors. While the Radeon HD 6990 accomplishes the performance of two Radeon HD 6970's in CrossFireX, AMD also adds accelerated multimedia playback and transcoding, AMD HD3D stereoscopic technology, and support for the 3D Blu-ray multi-view CODEC (MVC). The AMD Radeon HD 6990 utilizes several new MSAA modes including Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing (EQAA), which Benchmark Reviews tests in some of the most popular DirectX-11 video games.

Not everyone can afford to have the most powerful computer with multiple 26" monitors, or maybe you have realised that you don't need a $500 video card to play your favorite game. For those of you that can relate to my previous statement there is the ASUS ENGTS450 DirectCU OC Video Card, it comes armed with a overclocked GPU running at 850MHz and slightly overclocked memory frequency of 950MHz (3.8GHz effective). It looks good, it does the job, but you won't be able to turn on all the fancy settings of your favorite game while playing at a high resolution. What's more important is that this is quite possibly the coolest video card I have had on my table, I'm talking 57°C at full load with the fan spinning at 30%. Benchmark Reviews aims to provide you with an unbiased review of the ASUS GeForce GTS 450 DirectCU OC and report back our findings, keeping you informed on the latest technologies available on the market today.