Asus A8N SLI Premium - NF4 SLI For AMD Refined
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With Doom 3's graphical settings configured for "high quality" mode and the screen resolution turned up to 1600X1200, the game engine and graphics rendering loads are a heavy burden for even one of the most powerful Graphics Processors on the market today, the GeForce 6800GT. Certainly the recently released GeForce 7800GTX would have a much easier time with this, but then again a pair of 6800GTs in parallel at least in theory should offer nearly twice the performance.
As expected, this high resolution in-game test benefits in a big way from dual GeForce 6800GTs in an SLI configuration. Also as we envisioned, all three boards we tested, including the new Asus A8N SLI Premium posted scores within 1% of each, performance wise, whether configured with single graphics or an SLI setup.
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Leading edge DirectX 9 driven graphical effects, like those that can be found in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, also showed the three nForce 4 SLI motherboards we tested to perform at essentially identical levels. Obviously, while the new A8N SLI Premium is a top end enthusiast class motherboard that is ideal for gaming, its new all digital SLI configuration design (versus the mechanical SLI configuration PCBs that are found on the A8N SLI Deluxe and MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI) does not afford it any advantage in performance. However, without question, its benefits are obvious with respect to ease of use and possibly even reliability, due to the fact that single card or SLI settings can be configured by a simple toggle of the BIOS and driver setting.
