Doom 3

Far Cry

Unreal Tournament 2004

Half-Life 2

Between the two SLI boards, there isn't much difference between the them in a single card environment. Both are faster than the VIA board on average and the ASUS finishes on top in all of the tests save for Far Cry. Now, the question is, will we see a boost in SLI mode?

SLI Testing - Doom 3

SLI Testing - Far Cry

For the most part, we saw very little improvement going from SLI X8 to SLI X16. There was a slight bump in scores in Far Cry, but that was it. We did ping NVIDIA about this, and this was their response.

"Please check your BIOS settings to ensure that you have the correct HyperTransport settings. The HT links should be 16/16 in both directions and the frequency should be 1,000MHz (5x multiplier). Set these manually instead of using the Auto settings to ensure you are getting full performance from those buses.

Also, you may not see scaling between dual x8 vs. dual x16 using standard game settings. We encourage you to use higher resolution antialiasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering (AF) settings to generate the traffic necessary to see scaling. Using 8x/16x SLI-AA with 16x AF on both platforms and then comparing them will show you the scaling you expect.

Keep in mind that you need to use more powerful GPUs and CPUs to generate the necessary traffic to show scaling. If your game scores remain the same across different resolutions/settings, you are most likely CPU bound."

We did follow their criteria, but we're afraid this is a situation where we were CPU limited. We did try to correct this prior to publishing the review, but we were unable to upgrade the processor to meet our review deadline. We will address this in an upcoming review though.

NEXT