@17 seconds:
- 90% of all cards are pure retail cards, no golden samples. All this was verified and proofed.
- the Asic quality is more or less voodo. GPU-Z makes a lot of errors and it's not clear, which GPU-Z version gives you which result.
- I've tested a handfull of 290X f.e. and the bechmark results were mostly similar. But the power consumption not (up to 5% difference)
As I we wrote in the article - the selection of benchmarks is the result of a long selection process and if you take a look at the normalized results (index) you can see, that this results are very close to the average of other sites. For all this benchmarks the driver war is more or less over, so we get stable results over a longer time. All exclusive things were not used as StressFX or PhysX, some anti-alisasing options or lights/shadows.
If I see from company A or N some significant driver improvements, I'm able now to re-bench all the stuff partially. This was done one time with the latest Wonder-driver from Nvidia a few weeks ago. And Dirt3? OpenCL is public, not AMD-exclusive. It is Nvidias part to improve finally the OpenCL performance, because it is 100% a driver issue.
The difference between quiet and uber mode is with full heated cards (and normalized over all benches) below 2%. You can hold in therory the clock rates a little bit longer but after heating and reaching the target temperature above 90°C all this reference cards increases the clock speed to hold it. This "uber mode" is only used to disguise the weakness of this really horrible cooling solution for a few minutes longer.
And finally:
I will bench all reference cards first to make an overview, but I'll also add the results of custom cards later - periodically, each month. I'm not able to write reviews and bechmark more than 20 cards per month at the same time. The current charts content was produced within 2 months and I'm sure that this is a good base to extend it step by step.