Maingear Ephex 3-Way SLI Performance Gaming System
ET Quake Wars High End Gaming Performance
In our next series of gaming tests, we're intentionally not looking at the traditional comparison benchmarks versus our other reference test systems. Rather, we're want to offer you a view of what this system can do with a single, dual-SLI and 3-Way SLI NVIDIA graphics setup under the hood. As such, the remainder of our gaming tests are not CPU bound test conditions, but instead are high image quality GPU bound benchmark runs in some of the most leading-edge game engines of today.
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 Enemy Territory: Quake Wars |
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is Based on id's radically enhanced Doom 3 engine and viewed by many as Battlefield 2 meets the Strogg, and then some. In fact, we'd venture to say that id took EA's team-based warfare genre up a notch or two. ET: Quake Wars also marks the introduction of John Carmack's "Megatexture" technology that employs extremely large environment and terrain textures that cover vast areas of maps without the need to repeat and tile many small textures. The beauty of megatexture technology is that each unit only takes up a maximum of 8MB of frame buffer memory. Add to that HDR-like bloom lighting and leading edge shadowing effects and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars looks great, plays well and works high end graphics cards vigorously. The game was tested with all of its in-game options set to their maximum values with soft particles enabled in addition to 4X anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering. |
With the Maingear Ephex, it's a fairly straight forward calculation, seeing where SLI and 3-Way SLI scale in performance, especially with a 3.8GHz quad-core CPU driving the graphics pipline. What's obvious here is that you don't need 3-Way SLI actually to drive excellent frame rates at super high def 2560X1600 resolutions, even with 4X or 8X AA turned on. In fact, a single card runs this game just fine at 2560X1600 with 4X AA enabled but we know some of you might jones at the site of these 3-Way SLI scores where even 8X AA settings hold up to well over 60 fps. Simply put, outstanding.
