NVIDIA nForce 780a SLI Motherboard Round-Up
Gaming: Crysis and F.E.A.R.
For our next set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with Crysis and F.E.A.R. When testing motherboards or processors with Crysis or F.E.A.R., we drop the resolution to 800x600, and reduce all of the in-game graphical options to their minimum values to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible. However, the in-game effects, which control the level of detail for the games' physics engines and particle systems, are left at their maximum values, since these actually do place some load on the CPU rather than GPU.
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There are two things we can ascertain from the results above. While using a discreet graphics card, the nForce 780a SLI put up slightly better scores than the AMD 790FX. We suspect coupling an NVIDIA graphics card with an NVIDIA chipset, which usually increases performance somewhat, is the root cause of the increases seen here. We also see that the nForce 780a SLI IGP is able to run, and put up respectably frame rates, in both games at these relatively low settings. If you'd like to see how the IGP fared in more taxing situations, we're going to cover that in a couple of pages.
