Well they are realistic because they are the results we obtained. However although we can understand that the kind of person seeking out a setup such as this is unlikely to run X58, that is our test setup. If we changed the underlying system every review then we couldn't compare anything to anything else and would be swamped with "but how does it compare to the xxx ??". At least this way each card is, driver changes aside, reviewed on the same rig and so you get a pure performance comparison.