NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI Preview

Name: NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI Preview - Page 15
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, November 08, 2006, 12:50 PM EDT

For our next set of tests, we benchmarked all of the test systems using a custom single-player Quake 4 timedemo. Here, we installed the game's official v1.3 point release which is SMP capable and ran some tests in two configurations. First, we turned 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 is much more CPU and memory bandwidth-bound than anything else. In the second set of tests, we cranked the resoltuion to 1600x1200 and enabled 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering to see how each board performed in a more GPU bound situation.

Benchmarks with Quake 4 v1.3

OpenGL Gaming Performance

Our custom low-resolution Quake 4 benchmark had the EVGA nForce 680i SLI motherboard finishing in first place, outpacing the 975X Express by 2.5 frames per second. Not a large margin of victory, but a victory for the 680i SLI nonetheless.

The tables turned in favor of the 975X Express in our high-resolution Quake 4 benchmark. This time around, the Intel-built chipset took the pole position, followed very closely behind by the nForce 680i SLI. The 975X Express' margin of victory was only 1.6 frames per second though, which equates to only a 1.3% difference.

Tags: Nvidia, nforce, sli, Pre, force, preview, review, view, 680, IE, id

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