The nVidia GTX 280 is easily the fastest gaming GPU at the moment and we thought we'd find out how well it does in a dual card setup. From past experiences, we've seen that SLI or Crossfire add quite a bit of overhead (SLI especially) and doubling the GPUs certainly doesn't result in doubling the performance- far from it actually. We already had nVidia's reference card and thus, when we received the ASUS GeForce GTX 280, we wanted to see how fast can it get with an SLI setup.
The results are what you will see in the next few pages, but before that, here is the testbed that was used.
Testbed
CPU:
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 3.2GHz
Memory:
2 x 1GB OCZ DDR3-1600MHz Memory Modules
Motherboard:
ASUS Striker II Extreme
Optical/Hard Drives:
Generic 8X DVDRW, Maxtor 80GB 7200RPM/8MB Cache SATA
Monitor:
BENQ 24" LCD with 1920x1200 Resolution
Operating System:
Windows Vista Ultimate - 32bit
PSU:
1000W Silverstone PSU
For comparison, we've taken quite a few dual cards setups as well as Triple SLI in one case. On the AMD side we have the 4850 and 3870 X2 in Corssfire while with nVidia cards, we have SLI in 9850 GX2 and 9800GTX which is also used in Triple SLI. The only single GPU card is the original GeForce GTX 280 to see how fast two cards are compared to one. The following applications are used in this article
Benchmarks
Future Mark:
Latest versions of 3DMark 2003, 3DMark 2005 and 3DMark 2006 running at default settings
Company of Heroes:
Direct-X 10. Using built-in benchmark
Crysis:
Direct-X 10. Using built-in benchmark
ET: Quake Wars:
Direct-X 9: Using timedemo
Half Life 2 Episode 2:
Direct-X 9: Custom timedemo
Lost Planet: XC:
Direct-X 10: Built-in benchmark
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:
Direct-X 9: Using timedemo
Unreal Tournament 3:
Direct-X 9, Using custom timedemo
Word in Conflict:
Direct-X 10 built-in benchmark
If you would like for us to add any additional benchmarking software, please email us at suggestions@tbreak.com
