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Gaming
Now if you are a regular here at Guru3D.com then you have heard me rambling on and on about CPU limitation versus graphics cards. As sort of a little bonus I quickly performed a couple of benchmarks. At 10x7 and 4xAA + 8x AF even modern games can run into CPU limitation. In such a case the graphics car can not render any faster because it is waiting on the CPU to present data to the graphics card driver.
Now both the two test systems we used are 100% similar when it comes to specification and configurations. The only difference between the two systems is that tour Albatron K8SLI is equipped with the thousand dollar AMD FX-57 processor. Let me show you what I meant with that CPU limitation:
To get you a bit of an idea what difference systems all together can do for your gaming performance above you can see the K8SLI platform with two 7800 GTX cards SLI and 1 GB memory compared to a Gigabyte Athlon 4000+ based system also with two 7800 GTX cards SLI and 1 GB memory.
Agreed, these results are not 100% fair though as the FX-57 is a faster processor compared to the Athlon 64 4000+, but it's the closest thing that can compare plus I wanted to show you the impact of the processor and of course SLI functionality itself. None the less it should get you an idea of what the K8SLI is capable of.
As stated the results are measured in a resolution of 1024x768 with 4 levels of antialiasing enabled and 8 levels of anisotropic filtering. As you can see these are significant changes. Half Life 2 is an extremely CPU limited game, so the second it will get more CPU performance or a system in which it can get geometry faster the score will go up in a very noteworthy way. The same goes for Doom 3 and definitely Return to Castle Wolvenstein. Halo didn't care much about it though.
If you like to learn more about SLI then please read one of our many SLI videocard reviews.
3DMark 03 Professional
3DMark 05 Business Edition
Last but not least the 3DMark benchmark series is built by Futuremark Corporation (formerly known as MadOnion.com). More than 5 million benchmark results have been submitted to Futuremarks Online ResultBrowser database. It has become a point of great prestige to be the holder of the highest 3DMark score. A compelling, easy-to-use interface has made 3DMark very popular among game enthusiasts. Futuremarks latest benchmark, 3DMark03, continues this tradition by providing a Microsoft DirectX 9 benchmark.
The introduction of DirectX 9 and new hardware shader technologies puts a lot of power in the hands of game developers. Increasingly realistic 3D games will be available over the next year and a half. The use of 3D graphics will become more accessible to other applications areas and even operating systems. In this new environment, 3DMark03 will serve as a tool for benchmarking 3D graphics.
*cough & choke!* 27,765 points in 03 and 12656 in 05. Now this is interesting as on the two PC's everything is the same except the CPU. and 3DMark is the only piece of software that takes the CPU out of the calculation, so here we see a definite performance win for the Albatron K8SLI over Gigabyte's solution.
Quite fashionable don't you agree? Yes, SLI based systems are stealing the thunder eh?
