eVGA nForce 680i SLI mainboard review - Page 17

Before we start off with our game benchmarks...

We will start off with a series of CPU limited games. I have been shouting my lungs out for a while now, you need a really fast CPU's to test this properly, and today finally we can as we can overclock this Core 2 Duo processor towards 3.6 GHz.

Again to prove to you that our overclock was 100% stable we include the overclock results of 3.6 GHz in ALL gaming benchmark sessions.

In the game benchmarks we'll primarily focus on a high-end NF590 based FX-62 2 GIG system and compare that to today's tested 680i based system with the E6600 processor. We will also be testing against the NF590 Intel board with the Core 2 Duo E6600.

As stated we'll include overclocked results as well so in these benchmarks you'll notice the results with the processor overclocked at 3.4 and 3.6 GHz as well.

Enjoy.

Doom 3

At the 2002 E3 exhibit ID Software showed of DOOM 3. Days after that the world was shocked as somehow that demo got leaked onto the Internet. It's now 2004 and the game has finally been released! The breathtaking realism of the Doom III engine basically depends on two features; a realistic physics engine and a unified lighting scheme that incorporates detailed bump-mapping and volumetric shadows. Hardware older than GeForce 4/3 lack the flexibility and power to run Doom 3 with detailed features at an acceptable frame-rate. The engine is once again written in OpenGL.

DOOM 3 sports a brand spanking new game engine that's a marvel to see. The amount of special effects that master programmer John Carmack has whipped up show us environments that we've heard about but have never seen before. ID has made an engine that specializes around the type of game they made: dark, scary, and intense. The game takes place on a base on Mars in the year 2145. The environments will give you a feeling of claustrophobia, which is only heightened by the game's dark atmosphere. Every light in the game is cast by some actual light source somewhere. If there's no lights on in the room, you'll see literally nothing and will need to turn on a flashlight. Shoot out a light in the middle of a battle, and you'll need to fight blindly. Sometimes, graphics do truly contribute to atmosphere as well as gameplay and with DOOM 3 it's obvious that id understands this better than most game developers.

In a weird way it's almost impossible to fully describe what the game looks like, but needless to say it’s well beyond anything to date. Multi colored per-pixel lighting on bump-mapped surfaces. Each and every object in the game, including the teeth of the monsters you fight cast dynamic shadows, but not the jagged kind you may’ve seen in other recent games. The shadows are done using Carmack’s own algorithm. I’m sure many of you have upgraded specifically for this game, but it appears as though the video card is by far the most important piece of hardware needed. With a Geforce 6800 Ultra you can run the game at insane resolutions with huge amounts of detail (something I thoroughly enjoyed), but even at the lowest resolution with the lowest amount of detail it looks jawbreaking.

First off two old titles. We purely want to look at the effect of an overclock here. So we will not stress the graphics card and leave AA adn AF disabled. We used a GeForce 7950 GX2 here.

In dark green the system in it's "default" state with no overclock (CPU E6600 at 2.4 GHz) and to your right in bright green is the maximum overclock at 3.6 GHz.

Will you please look at the difference in 1024x768 (10x7) the difference between the default E6600 and the overclock is roughly 40 FPS. Once you go higher in resolution the graphics card will become the limiting factor.

Aquamark 3

One more old CPU limited title. We knew that AM3 is massively CPU bound and therefore we should see some differences. So here we see in all circumstances the same graphics card (7950 GX2 1024MB) scaled extremely well. Again at 10x7 the differential is roughly 30 FPS.

But what about modern titles with AA and AF enabled you ask ? That's the real-world scenario. Let's have a look.