System Setup

System Setup

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (S939)

ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe

1GB Corsair CMX512-3200XLPRO (2x512MB)

BFG GeForce 6800 Ultra OC 512MB PCI Express x16
ASUS GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB PCI Express x16
ATI RADEON X850 XT 256MB Platinum Edition PCI Express x16
ATI RADEON X800 XL 512MB PCI Express x16
Detonator 76.50
Catalyst 5.4

34GB Western Digital Raptor (10,000RPM, 8MB cache)

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2

DirectX 9.0c

Desktop resolution 1024x768, 32-bit color, 85Hz refresh

All power saving options were turned off, as were the Automatic Update and System Restore services. Graphics options under the ‘Performance’ tab were all disabled for maximum performance.

The NVIDIA drivers used in this story are beta software still. For one reason or another, the latest official build doesn’t cooperate with the 512MB graphics cards, yielding a blue screen each time Windows tries to boot. We’ve confirmed this issue with NVIDIA and identified two possible workarounds. The first is to revert to an older driver, from February, which doesn’t seem to take advantage of SLI in very many applications. This is the driver that BFG includes and it does function. Alternatively, these beta drivers also enable full functionality, plus they seem to sport better SLI compatibility and viable overclocking.

Benchmarks

Futuremark 3DMark05
id Software Doom 3 Demo Demo001
Crytek Far Cry v.1.3 Custom Demo
Valve Software Half-Life 2 Custom Demo
1C: Maddox Games Pacific Fighters vs: B-24 Demo