Asus Extreme N6600GT x 2 - Revisiting SLI
The Test System & 3DMark05
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested our pair of Asus N6600GTs on an MSI Neo4 Platinum / SLI nForce 4 SLI-based motherboard, powered by an AMD Athlon 64 4000+ CPU and 1GB of Corsair XPert RAM. The first thing we did when configuring this test system was enter the BIOS and loaded the "High Performance Defaults." The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with SP2 was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed the latest nForce 4 chipset drivers, installed all of the other necessary drivers for the rest of our components, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were then disabled, the hard drive was defragmented, and a 768MB permanent page file was created on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of the benchmarking software, and ran the tests.
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| Hardware: Motherboards - Video Cards - Memory - Audio - Hard Drive - Optical Drive - Other - Software: Operating System - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - |
AMD Athlon 64 4000+ processor (2.4GHz) MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum / SLI nForce4 SLI chipset Dual GeForce 6600 GTs Dual GeForce 6800 GTs - SLI GeForce 6600 GT GeForce 6800 GT ATI Radeon X800 XL 1024MB Corsair XMS XPert PC3200 RAM CAS 2 Integrated on board Western Digital "Raptor" 36GB - 10,000RPM - SATA Lite-On 16X DVD-ROM 3.5-inch Floppy Drive Windows XP Professional SP2 (Fully Patched) nForce Drivers v6.53 DirectX 9.0c NVIDIA Forceware v71.89 ATI Catalyst v5.4 |
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;) 3DMark05 |
3DMark05 is the latest installment in a line of synthetic 3D graphics benchmarks, dating back to late 1998. 3DMark99 came out in October 1998 and was followed by the DirectX 7 benchmark, 3DMark2000, roughly two years later. The DirectX 8.1-compliant 3DMark2001 was released shortly thereafter, and became a very popular tool used by many hardcore gamers. 3DMark03, however, wasn't quite as well received thanks in no small part to the disapproval of graphics giant NVIDIA. With 3DMark05, though, Futuremark hopes to regain some of its audience with an advanced DirectX 9 benchmarking tool. We ran 3DMark05's default test (1,024 x 768) on all of the cards and configurations we tested and have the overall results for you posted below. |
A single Asus N6600 GT performed well in the default 3DMark05 test, but as you can see, adding a second card had a dramatic effect on performance. The single 6600GT trailed behind the high-end 6800 GT and X800 XL cards by about 1400 points. However, enabling SLI mode with a second 6600 GT installed put the pair of 6600 GTs well ahead of either of the single-card configurations we tested. Enabling SLI-mode increased performance by 2755 3DMarks, a jump of over 78.6%.
