System Setup and Notes
Hardware
| System | NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX Test System |
|---|---|
| Processor | Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz, 4MiB L2 cache, LGA775) |
| Motherboard | eVGA nForce 680i SLI |
| Memory | Corsair TWIN2X2048-9136C5D |
| Memory timings and speed | 4-4-4-12 1T @ 800MHz |
| Graphics card(s) | NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX 768MiB NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX (650/880) 512MiB ATI Radeon X1950 XTX (650/1000) |
| Disk drive(s) | Seagate ST3160812AS |
| Mainboard software | NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI Intel Edition 9.53 |
| Graphics driver | NVIDIA ForceWare 96.94 (8800 GTX) NVIDIA ForceWare 91.47 WHQL (7900 GTX) ATI CATALYST 6.10 WHQL (X1950 XTX) |
Operating System | Windows XP Professional, w/ SP2, 32-bit | Display | Dell 3007WFP, 2560x1600, 30" LCD monitor | PSU | Tagan TG420-U22, 420W |
NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI
Ah, one of today's other big deals but one we can't quite cover in the detail we want. But here's the good stuff as an overview.NVIDIA are also launching brand new core logic today, to partner G80. The top SKU is called nForce 680i SLI, and it pairs brand new silicon with an in-house board design and BIOS, giving adjustability and performance that'll supposedly blow your sockets off. While we don't quite have a full review of the new silicon for you today, we can let you know that it's a few percent here and there faster than Intel P965 and i975X at the same base clocks and settings, but nothing amazing or revolutionary when paired with our Core 2 Extreme X6800.
However, the eVGA-branded example board hits 500MHz CPU bus frequency out of the box without hardware level tweaks and limited adjust in the BIOS, runs asynchronously on the memory clock at any FSB almost as fast as running a full integer step above (we've been doing limited testing at 500/600 in that respect with new Dominator DIMMs from Corsair) and the board supports SLI Memory, LinkBoost and the rest of the NVIDIA goody bag when it comes to tweaking.
The BIOS is simply the best we've yet seen and the eVGA mainboard's layout is quite excellent. In short, it's the best mainboard your reviewer has ever seen, but you'll have to wait for our full gamut of tests before we can conclusively prove why that's the case for the enthusiast. Cooling is passive or active depending on whether you want to attach the optional fan or not to the northbridge heatsink, and the board has three PCI Express x16 slots (16-16-8 lane assignments), 10 USB2.0 ports, 6 SATA2 with various levels of hardware RAID, two GigE ports native in the hardware and an LGA775 socket for whatever Intel CPU you like, Core 2 Quad most definitely included.
In fact NVIDIA admit to tuning 680i for excellent Core 2 Quad performance. It's been the rock solid base for our G80 testing since day one with nary a peep from the board in terms of worries. This might sound like an advert at this point, but the board really is that good. XFX, BFG and some of NVIDIA's other usual graphics board partners will be selling the board to retail with their own branding, so look out for those with immediate availability.
Software
We used the old three game suite (one with a new demo though) to see how performance was with 8800 GTX, along with a quadruplet of new titles that put some serious strain on a modern GPU under D3D9. Three of those will form the basis of our next suite.| 3D Benchmarks |
Far Cry Quake 4 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Oblivion Dark Messiah of Might and Magic Half Life 2: Episode 1 Company of Heroes |
|---|
Notes
Far Cry was patched to version v1.33 and uses a custom in-house demo, Quake 4 was patched to 1.3 and uses a custom netdemo, SC:CT was patched to 1.05 and uses the supplied Lighthouse demo, Oblivion was patched to v1.1 and uses an in-house walkthrough of an outdoor section nearby the Black Road, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is unpatched and uses a custom in-house demo, Half Life 2: EP1 was as Steam decreed on the 3rd November and taken offline for testing using a custom in-house demo, and finally Company of Heroes was patched to 1.2 and used the built-in performance test (although it's a little optimistic about in-game performance we find).We tested at 1600x1200, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 (odd choices in terms of megapixel distribution, but mostly popular LCD panel sizes for the high-end gamer in recent years). Note that the images on the next page are very large, and the linked ones much, much larger to boot (in the range of 7MB each).
