Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI Quad Royal Motherboard
SLI Testing
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From the low-quality gaming benchmarks, we're now going to move on to some more demanding tests using a pair of 7800GTs in SLI mode. For these tests, we will only be using the MSI P4N Diamond (n4Force-SLI) and the two boards using the updated n4Force-SLI X16: the Asus P5N32-SLI and Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI. In the past, we hadn't seen much improvement when moving from 16 to 32 graphic lanes, so we were hoping for some improvement with the GA-8N-SLI. To do so, we will be using two of the more demanding graphic engines: Doom3 and Far Cry.
Well, we're still not seeing any huge improvements when using nForce4 SLI X16 motherboards. The GA-8N-SLI, coming to market a few months later than the Asus P5N32-SLI slightly outperforms the older MSI P4N Diamond by a few frames in most tests, with the widest margin occurring during testing Far Cry at 1600x1200. On the other hand, the Gigabyte board typically fell behind the Asus P5N32-SLI in just about every benchmark run, although usually by not much more than a frame or two per second.
