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For purposes of this review I took out the FX-62 that we normally use for video card testing and used a QX6700 CPU. The 8800GTX in single mode is CPU limited in a lot of situations already and two of them will be even more so. The QX6700 is the fastest available CPU for the market and the performance should be interesting. Of note during testing with the 850W PSU is that I couldn't get reproducible benchmarks in a lot of cases causing a delay in this review that turned out to be a problem with the CPU, SLI and SATA RAID combined.
Test System 2's benchmark results were reproducible, but I had an odd error with Quake 4, resulting in crashes every time I tried to run the benchmark in single card mode. You'll notice that there are a couple of instances where SLI is faster than a single card. I attribute this to a new architecture with immature drivers. In every other instance SLI performance is greater than the single card by wide factors.
Test System 1
- EVGA nForce 680i SLI motherboard
- Two XFX 8800GTX cards in SLI mode and single card mode 97.02 Forceware
- 850W Enermax PSU
- 2 74GB Western Digital Raptor SATA HDDs
- Corsair XMS2 8500 DDR2 1066MHz memory SLI-Ready
- ASUS 16x DVD-ROM
- Intel QX6700 Quad Core CPU running at 2.66GHz
Test System 2
- 2 AMD Athlon FX-74 CPU running @ 3GHz
- 2 GB Corsair XMS 8500 DDR2 1066MHz SLI ready memory EPP Profiles
- PC Power and Cooling 1000W PSU
- 2 150GB WD Raptor SATA HDDs
- Corsair Dominator XMS2 8500 DDR2 1066MHz memory EPP SLI ready
- ASUS 16x DVD-ROM
- ASUS nForce 680a motherboard
Test Software
- Battlefield 2142 Custom Timedemo Max settings 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 2048x1536 no AA no AF, 4x AA 16x AF, 16x AA 16x AF, 16xQ AA 16x AF
- Quake 4 Custom Timedemo HQ settings 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 2048x1536 no AA no AF, 4x AA 16x AF, 16x AA 16x AF, 16xQ AA 16x AF
- FEAR Max Settings Performance Timedemo 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 2048x1536 no AA no AF, 4x AA 16x AF, 16x AA 16x AF, 16xQ AA 16x AF
- 3Dmark06 default run 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 1920x1200, 2048x1536
- 3Dmark05 default run 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 1920x1200, 2048x1536
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