3DMark06

Doom 3

Far Cry

Unreal Tournament 2004

Half-Life 2

Between the two SLI boards, we're seeing slightly better results for the SLI X16 board when compared to the AMD counterparts. This is a bit surprising since we're still dealing with single cards here, but credit should probably go towards ASUS' engineers and the refinements in the latest nForce SLI Intel chipsets. Now, the question is, will we see a boost in SLI mode?

SLI Testing - Doom 3

There's a nice 5fps boost for Doom 3. We quickly ran through some other tests and saw varying improvements of 3% to 8% in the same games as tested earlier. This is more or less in line with what NVIDIA has discovered in their own testing. Here's a snippet from our AMD testing comments:

"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."

NEXT