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

Our first benchmarking effort was frankly a bit frivolous but with all this horsepower at your disposal, you can't help but get that way once in a while.  We'll ask for forgiveness someday but for now we were after some guilt-free 3DMark06 bragging rights.  We were looking to knock King Pin off his ORB perch and though we didn't break the 20K mark, here's a look at what we achieved on standard air cooling with the LN2 crutch, thanks very much.

Performance Comparisons with 3DMark06 v1.0.2
Details: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmark06/

3DMark06

3DMark06 is the latest addition to the 3DMark franchise. This version differs from 3Dmark05 in a number of ways, and now includes not only Shader Model 2.0 tests, but Shader Model 3.0 and HDR tests as well. Some of the assets from 3DMark05 have been re-used, but the scenes are now rendered with much more geometric detail and the shader complexity is vastly increased as well. Max shader length in 3DMark05 was 96 instructions, while 3DMark06 ups the number of instructions to 512. 3DMark06 also employs much more lighting, and there is extensive use of soft shadows. With 3DMark06, Futuremark has also updated how the final score is tabulated. In this latest version of the benchmark, SM 2.0 and HDR / SM3.0 tests are weighted and the CPU score is factored into the final tally as well.

Our stock Core 2 Extreme QX6700 rig is actually ranked about 1K 3DMarks faster than a similarly equipped Core 2 Duo X6800 setup.  Taking things up a notch further, our 3.33GHz overclocked QX6700 driving the overclocked GeForce 8800 GTX cards posts up a huge 3000 point gain.  As a side note, running our GPUs at their stock speed but keeping the rest of the system overclocked yielded a score in the 16800 range.