Quad-Core Core 2 Extreme - GeForce 8800 GTX SLI NF680i Ultimate Gaming Rig

Name: Quad-Core Core 2 Extreme - GeForce 8800 GTX SLI NF680i Ultimate Gaming Rig - Page 3
Brand: Quad-Core

by Dave Altavilla — Wednesday, November 15, 2006, 02:50 PM EDT

Full System Specs And Vital Signs

Page 3: Full System Specs And Vital Signs

For your Pavlovian drool response pleasure, below are our full systems specifications including some details on how we arrived at our final overclocked and custom tweaked system speeds. Please keep our test setup specifications in mind when you consider the performance characteristics we'll show you in our upcoming benchmark runs.

HotHardware's Test Systems

Multi-Core And Multi-GPU - Light-Dimming Horsepower

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 Quad-Core Processor
(Overclocked to 3.33GHz)

Asus Striker Extreme Motherboard
(NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI - LinkBoost Enabled)

EVGA nForce 680i SLI Motherboard
(nForce 680i SLI - reference test-bed)

2x1GB Corsair Dominator Twin2X2048-9136C5D
CL 5-5-5-15 - DDR2-1142

2X GeForce 8800 GTX - In SLI
(Overclocked to 625/925)

On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

WD1500 "Raptor" HD
10,000 RPM SATA

Windows XP Pro SP2
NVIDIA Forceware v97.02
DirectX 9.0c

We achieved our heavily overclocked system setup with a few standard voltage tweaks, bumping the CPU core voltage to 1.5V (1.4V reported here is the variability of the health monitoring software) and setting various chipset voltages for the HyperTransport link, Northbridge and Southbridge to either 1.5 or 1.55V.

We also bumped our core GPU and Memory interface clocks on the GeForce 8800 GTX cards to 625MHz and 925MHz (1850MHz DDR) respectively. This was about the highest we could get this pair of cards to cooperate together and it did offer a measurable gain in performance over stock speeds.