NVIDIA's SLI Technology has been one of the driving forces behind the rapid adoption of PCI-Express-based video cards. SLI-capability combined with the well performing nForce 4 motherboard chipset is a great foundation for many enthusiast systems.
Typical investigations of the SLI technology have been performed on the fastest systems one can assemble. As such, with AMD leading Intel in the game performance arena, the vast majority of the investigations into the SLI technology and its impact on performance have been analyzed on the AMD platform and done so with the most powerful variants of GeForce video cards.
To switch things up a bit, we will examine SLI on the Intel platform with MSI’s P4N Diamond motherboard paired up with a couple of NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT’s, one of which is a reference model and the other an MSI NX7800GT-VT2D256E. While we have performed in-depth reviews of both of the MSI products and the reference model of the NVIDIA 7800 GT individually with various configurations, this article will examine the SLI functionality as an upgrade possibility to extend the life of the current card one may own.
MSI NX7800GT-VT2D256E
MSI P4N Diamond Motherboard
And without further adieu, let’s jump into the test system specs and the benchmarks.
TESTING CONFIGURATION
System Specifications
Intel Pentium 4 560 (3.6GHz) Processor
MSI P4N Diamond Motherboard
Mushkin 2GB (1GBx2) XP2 Memory
PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 510W ATX-PFC Power Supply
Seagate 250GB SATA HDD
MSI NX7800GT-VT2D256E Graphics Card
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT Graphics Card
Samsung SyncMaster 900NF - 19-Inch Monitor
32-Bit Color / Vsync Disabled
NVIDIA ForceWare 82.12 Drivers at Quality Image Setting
nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition 7.12
Windows XP Home Service Pack 2 / DirectX 9.0c
BIOS Settings
Memory Timing - 4-4-4-12
800 MHz Memory Speed
800 MHZ Front Side Bus
Games Tested
FarCry - v1.33)
F.E.A.R. - v1.02
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
The results displays are an average of three separate runs of the same demo. Anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were applied by utilizing the in-game menus.
Every image enhancing feature of the games tested was enabled, except in F.E.A.R. where soft shadows were disabled throughout most of the testing due to the extremely adverse effect on performance. However, soft shadows are enabled where the feature's impact on performane is examined.
