A lot of technologies are introduced way before their time or, in other words, offer a lot more than what is required of them. For example, SATA2 provides 3.0GB/sec bandwidth but even the fastest hard drives in RAID cant offer sustained data throughput that matches even half of the bandwidth available.
Today, we take a look at nVidia’s nForce4 x16 chipset that offers two PCI-E x16 slots to provide the maximum bandwidth to video cards running in SLI mode. However, is this really needed with the current generation of cards or, like SATA2, its simply an overkill? That’s precisely what we’ll find out today by using two 7800GTX cards in SLI mode on a standard nForce4 SLI motherboard as well as an nForce4 SLI x16 motherboard. Lets look at the testbed.
CPU:
AMD Athlon64 X2 4800+ CPU
Memory:
2 x 512MB Corsair DDR400 Memory Module
Motherboard:
DFI nForce4 SLI DR MSI K8N Diamond Plus
Optical/Hard Drives:
Generic 8X DVDRW, Western Digital 80GB 7200RPM/8MB Cache SATA
Monitor:
LG 19" CRT Monitor
Operating System:
Windows XP Professional SP2
VGA Drivers:
nVidia Forceware 81.98
We've selected four games at different resolution and details as well as 3D Marks for benchmarking. Here is a detailed breakdown
