Benchmarks - 3DMark11
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3DMark 11 is the latest version of this hugely-popular synthetic benchmark. Making use of DX11 features such as tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading, it provides modern-day results and is available as a free download.
There's an imperceptible rise in performance over a reference Radeon HD 7970 when using the out-of-the-box BIOS setting. Remember, it increases speeds to 950/5,700MHz. Perhaps Sapphire is using laxer-than-reference timings for the RAM?
Switch to the second BIOS and there's a near-five per cent increase over a stock card, though even Sapphire OC Dual-X has to give way to a GTX 680.