eVGA Classified SR-2 review with Quad SLI GTX 480 on LN2

3DMark 06 CPU test

Well, everybody loves 3DMark06, and nowadays, it's CPU limited, making it a nice application to check CPU performance. The scores that you see obviously are the CPU test itself, not overall 3DMark06 scores.

TBH we expected a little more with two CPUs, but once we start to overclock, the performance increase is incredible. This means that we are limited in supported CPU threads, hence the massive increase when overclocked.

3DMark Vantage (DirectX 10) - CPU Score

3DMark Vantage focuses on the two areas most critical to gaming performance: the CPU and the GPU. With the emergence of multi-package and multi-core configurations on both the CPU and GPU side, the performance scale of these areas has widened, and the visual and game-play effects made possible by these configurations are accordingly wide-ranging. This makes covering the entire spectrum of 3D gaming a difficult task. 3DMark Vantage solves this problem in three ways:

1. Isolate GPU and CPU performance benchmarking into separate tests,
2. Cover several visual and game-play effects and techniques in four different tests, and
3. Introduce visual quality presets to scale the graphics test load up through the highest-end hardware.

To this end, 3DMark Vantage has two GPU tests, each with a different emphasis on various visual techniques, and two CPU tests, which cover the two most common CPU-side tasks: Physics Simulation and AI. It also has four visual quality presets (Entry, Performance, High, and Extreme) available in the Advanced and Professional versions, which increase the graphics load successively for even more visual quality. Each preset will produce a separate, official 3DMark Score, tagged with the preset in question.

3DMark Vantage has a standalone CPU test. It's very multi-core and multi-threading aware but limited to 16 CPU threads. We applied a few tweaks to bypass that limitation though, it was no surprise to see the SR2 platform kick in real hard, it's also a title that likes hyper-threading which clearly favors Nehalem processors.

3DMark Vantage (DirectX 10) - P Score

3DMark Vantage focuses on the two areas most critical to gaming performance: the CPU and the GPU. With the emergence of multi-package and multi-core configurations on both the CPU and GPU side, the performance scale of these areas has widened, and the visual and game-play effects made possible by these configurations are accordingly wide-ranging. This makes covering the entire spectrum of 3D gaming a difficult task. 3DMark Vantage solves this problem in three ways:

1. Isolate GPU and CPU performance benchmarking into separate tests,
2. Cover several visual and game-play effects and techniques in four different tests, and
3. Introduce visual quality presets to scale the graphics test load up through the highest-end hardware.

To this end, 3DMark Vantage has two GPU tests, each with a different emphasis on various visual techniques, and two CPU tests, which cover the two most common CPU-side tasks: Physics Simulation and AI. It also has four visual quality presets (Entry, Performance, High, and Extreme) available in the Advanced and Professional versions, which increase the graphics load successively for even more visual quality. Each preset will produce a separate, official 3DMark Score, tagged with the preset in question.

And finally, above you can see 3DMark Vantage, this time the overall P score.

We measure here with four GPUS, thus four GeForce GTX 480 cards clocked at roughly 1050 MHz a piece. By doing so we achieved a record, a P score of 61157 points. That's just majestic.

We also have a world record leading entry with just two GTX 480 GPUs, scoring 52721 points with a stable 1125 Mhz on both GPU cores and 5.4 Ghz on the processors -- not bad eh?