Asus CrossHair NF590 SLI: Republic of Gamers

Name: Asus CrossHair NF590 SLI: Republic of Gamers - Page 9
Brand: Asus

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, March 14, 2007, 11:00 PM EDT

To start our in-game testing, we did some low-resolution benchmarking with F.E.A.R. When testing motherboards and processors with F.E.A.R, we drop the resolution to 640x480, and lower all of the in-game graphical options to their minimum values to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible.

Benchmarks with F.E.A.R: Low Quality

DX9 Gaming Performance

The CrossHair put up 7 more frames per second than the M2N32-SLI in our low-res F.E.A.R. benchmark. Despite being based on the same chipset, and using the exact same supporting hardware, the CrossHair's framerate was 3.9% higher than the M2N32-SLI. It seems Asus has done some tweaking with the CrossHair that gives it an edge here.

Benchmarks with Quake 4 v1.2: Low Quality

OpenGL Gaming Performance

For our next game test, we benchmarked all of the test systems using a custom single-player Quake 4 timedemo. Here, we installed the game's official v1.2 patch which is SMP capable, tuned the resolution down to 640x480, and configured the game to run at its "Low-Quality" graphics setting. Although Quake 4 typically taxes today's high-end GPUs, when it's configured at these minimal settings, it too is more CPU and memory-bound than anything else.

Here too the CrossHair puts up a markedly higher framerate than the slightly older M2N32-SLI. A 4.2 frame per second advantage is hardly noticeable when framerates are this high, but the CrossHair nonetheless put up a score 2.8% higher than the M2N32-SLI.

Tags: Asus, sli, game, republic of gamers, ssh, gamers, gamer, EPUB, f5, OS, public, air, CrossHair, OSS, Mer, AI, AM

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com