XFX GF 8800GTX 575M SLI Review :: Test System 1

I decided to use the ultimate system available today for benchmarking this video card. The CPU is based upon Intel's new Quad Core QX6700 which is two Core 2 Duo E6700s on one die. There are few games that take advantage of four, much less 2 CPUs, but the CPU should be the best available for testing when applications call for it. AMD sent a FX-74 system for testing and due to time constraints and numerous problems, I decided to finish the testing with that system.

XFX provided two 8800GTX cards for the SLI review. The 8800GTX is NVIDIA's flagship video card, with DirectX 10 features, nearly double or more the performance of other video cards on the market. The XFX card is clocked at a frequency of default 575MHz, 1.35GHz for the Shader clock and 1.8GHz for the memory, the same as the default clocks on the 8800GTX reference card.

Card front

Card back

2-Slot

Two 74GB Western Digital Raptor drives are the hard disks I used in this review. The Raptor is a Serial ATA generation 1 drive with 10000 RPM as the spin speed. This is the fastest available SATA speed available. The drive has 8MB of cache. WD has produced a new HDD which is 150GB and has 16MB of cache but I don't have this drive at the moment.

The choice of Power Supply is one that every 8800GTX user has to consider. NVIDIA strongly recommends using SLI certified PSUs and after the experiences I had with two 8800GTXs I would have to concur. Unfortunately, the numerous power supplies that we initially had to test with don't offer enough consistent power to the 4 12V rails on the two 8800GTX cards and performance was extremely inconsistent as a result. Once we got a PC Power and Cooling PSU, the testing proceeded apace. The first motherboard we used for testing the two cards was a brand new EVGA 680i SLI motherboard from EVGA. Sporting the latest NVIDIA high-end chipset, the 680i is a perfect match for the GeForce 8800GTX SLI+Quad Core CPU that this test system is testing This board offers three PCI Express x16 slots, in SLI mode two of the slots are used.