MSI R7850 Power Edition OC Video Card Review

Asus P9X79 - X79 Chipset
Intel Core i7 3960x (3.3Ghz) Hex Core 6 x 256KB L2 Cache 15MB L3 Cache
CoolerMaster TPC 812
4x GSKill RipjawsZ PC2133 16GB DDR3 (9-11-10-28)
Western Digital VelociRaptor 150gb SerialATA 10000RPM
LG 20x Super Multi GSA-H55L
Thermaltake Toughpower Grand 1050 Watt PSU
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

Drivers
MSI R7850 Power Edition OC (12.4)
MSI R6870 Hawk (12.4)
Nvidia GTX 580 (285.62)

Framerates were captured using the benchmarking software and a program called FRAPS.  FRAPS is an easy to use program that will monitor the framerate right before it is displayed to the user.  Gameplay was recorded from the start of the level and would persist to a pre-determined end point.  Scores were then complied over the course of two runs and averaged to provide the totals you will see in the charts. In the instances where FRAPS was not used to capture game data the benchmark program average was used.

The purpose of our benchmark suite is to provide the readers with a comparative analysis of video card performance based on a common set of variables.  This may not always reflect a real "in-game" experience or framerates, since those are almost impossible to replicate, but is designed to provide an accurate scale of performance of one video card to another given their default settings.