NVIDIA nForce 790i SLI Ultra and GeForce 9800 GX2

Name: NVIDIA nForce 790i SLI Ultra and GeForce 9800 GX2 - Page 14
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, March 18, 2008, 08:00 AM EDT

For our next set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with Crysis and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. When testing processors with Crysis or ET:QW, 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.

Low-Resolution Gaming: Crysis and ET: Quake Wars

Taking the GPU out of the Equation

The nForce 790i SLI Ultra-based EVGA and ASUS motherboard outperformed every other platform in the low-resolution Crysis CPU benchmark. They didn't fare quite as well in the Enemy Territory benchmark, but their performance was still very good. In the low-resolution ETQW test, the X48 put up a slightly higher framerate, but the 790i SLI Ultras did finish ahead of the older nForce chipsets.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, nforce, 790i, sli, X2, Ultra, force, 980, ULT, id, and

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