NVIDIA nForce 780a SLI Motherboard Round-Up

Name: NVIDIA nForce 780a SLI Motherboard Round-Up - Page 7
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, May 06, 2008, 08:55 AM EDT

We ran all three of the nForce 780a SLI based motherboards we showed you earlier, through Futuremark’s latest system performance metric built especially for Windows Vista, PCMark Vantage, using both a discreet graphics card and the 780a SLI's IGP. PCMark Vantage runs through a host of different usage scenarios to simulate different types of workloads including High Definition TV and movie playback and manipulation, gaming, image editing and manipulation, music compression, communications, and productivity. Most of the tests are multi-threaded as well, so the tests can exploit the additional resources offered by a quad-core CPU.

Futuremark PCMark Vantage

Simulated Application Performance

PCMark Vantage told a very interesting story. According to this benchmark suite, the nForce 780a SLI is a few percentage points faster or right on par with the AMD 790FX chipset in every test with the exception of 'Communications' where the nForce boards blew everything out of the water. Usually this particular test scales with CPU performance, but it ran exceptional well on the nForce platform for some reason. Also note, system performance using the IGP isn't adversely affected in most tests. Only the 'Gaming' (which is to be expected) and the 'Memories" tests show a sharp drop off with the IGP.

Tags: Nvidia, nforce, sli, Motherboard, round-up, force, board, 780, id, AR

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