Maingear Ephex 3-Way SLI Performance Gaming System
Test Systems and SANDRA
How the test system was configured: We tested the Ephex 3-Way SLI system exactly as it came configured from Maingear. The system was shipped with its Core 2 Extreme QX6850 CPU pre-overclocked to 3.8GHz and Windows Vista Ultimate (32-bit edition) installed. NVIDIA's official Forceware 169.18 beta drivers came installed on the system along with the latest DX update. The only modification made to the Ephex was the upgrade of NVIDIA's Foreware drives to the full release 169.25 version.
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System 1: Core 2 Extreme QX6850 Overclocked EVGA 122-CK-NF68 2GB Corsair DDR2-8500 3 x GeForce 8800 Ultra SLI |
System 2: Reference Test System Core 2 Extreme QX9650 (3.0GHz - Quad-Core) Core 2 Duo E6850 (3.0GHz - Dual-Core) Asus P5E3 Deluxe 2x1GB Corsair DDR3-1800 GeForce 8800 GTX x2, GeForce GT x2, GeForce 8800 GTS x2, Radeon HD 3870 x2, Radeon HD 2900 XT x2 WD740 "Raptor" HD Windows Vista Ultimate 32-Bit |
System 3: MA790FX-DQ6 2x1GB Corsair PC2-8500 GeForce 8800 GTX WD740 "Raptor" HD Windows Vista Ultimate |
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We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA XII, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA XI suite with the Maingear Ephex ( CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, and Memory Bandwidth) . All of the scores reported below were taken with the system running as configured by Maingear with a CPU clock speed of 3.8GHz.
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In these synthetic, low-level system benchmarks, the Maingear Ephex obviously outpaced the stock systems used in SANDRA's reference library, thanks to its significant CPU clock speed advantage. In all of the tests, the Maingear Ephex was roughly 10% to 15% faster than the reference systems, with the exception of the memory test, where the Ephex's modestly configured 1066MHz DDR2 memory and 1266MHz FSB (317MHzX4) couldn't keep up with some of the newer DDR3 Intel based and AMD Phenom based systems.
