Test Setup


Test-methodology included comparing Asus N6600GT in single PCIe 16x and SLI mode to the venerable Gigabyte GV-NX68T256DH and the AOpen Aeolus 7800GTX-DVD256. I ran a LGA775 Prescott 630 at default speed (3.0GHz) and overclocked (3.75GHz). I carefully chose those components which would represent a "budget" or mid-level system at a budget price. I wanted to use water-cooling to extract more MHz from our CPU, instead I used high-end air-cooling as this option still costs less then entry-level water-cooling, although H20 cooling kit prices are dropping below the $100 mark as was evident with this XSPC - X20 kit.

Intel Test System
CPU	Pentium 630 Retail (SL7Z9 3.0GHz 2MB L2 1.25V ~ 1.388Vcore) Socket-775
Mainboards	Asus P5ND2-SLI Deluxe (BIOS 0605)
Memory	Crucial Tracer Balliztix 5300 (2x512MB DC CL5-5-5-15)
Graphics	1.) AOpen Aeolus 7800GTX-DVD256 2.) 2x Gigabyte GV-NX68T256DH 3.) 2x Asus N6600GT Extreme SLI 2x8X / Solo-16X
Power Supply	PCPower&Cooling TurboCool 850 SSI
Cooling	Thermaltake Blue ORB-II
Operating System	Windows XP

Synthetic 3D-Benchmarks. Futuremark aka MadOnion offers a full range of PC-benchmarks their forte being 3D-Testing. While Synthetic benchmarks do not represent "real world" games per se, they do provide an invaluable tool designed to demonstrate very specific architetctual aspects of video card performance. Each Furturemark 3DMark test suite was intended to emphasize attrbutes such as vertex shaders, antialisiaing, anisotropic filtering, DirectX etc. Futuremark describes their newest test 3DMark06 as follows;



3DMark2001SE 330: provides the following features; "DirectX®8.1 support...texturing tests, filtering tests, image quality tests..."



3DMark03: provides the following; "DirectX®9.0a support...high quality game tests, image quality tests, sound tests."



3DMark05 picks up where -03 left off, offering; "...latest generation of DirectX®9.0 graphics cards. It is the first benchmark to require a DirectX9.0 compliant hardware with support for Pixel Shaders 2.0 or higher...combining high quality 3D tests, CPU tests, feature tests, image quality tools, and much more..."



3DMark06,is the latest and greatest. The suite measures; "advanced real-time 3D game workloads to measure PC performance using a suite of DirectX 9 3D graphics tests, CPU tests, and 3D feature tests...all new HDR/SM3.0 graphics tests, SM2.0 graphics tests, AI and physics driven single and multiple cores or processor CPU tests and a collection of comprehensive feature tests to reliably measure next generation gaming performance."



PCMark05 is a full system test suite measuring HDD performance, Webpage rendering, CPU and other tests including 3D.



Onto "real world" tests ->