Examining the gear
Examining the gear
To be able to understand what we are doing today, we need to briefly take you through some of the key components used for el Diablo (the nickname of our PC). A home built DIY (Do It Yourself) X58 based Core i7 system.
So before we start, some custom parts we will be using I want to show to you first:
- Core i7 965 overclocked @ 3750 MHz
- Motherboard -- Intel X58 eVGA Classified 3-way SLI combatible
- Memory -- Corsair Dominator 6144 MB (3x 2048 MB) DDR3 Corsair @ 1600 MHz CAS 7
- 2x 128GB SSD (dual boot - one OS for ATI cards / one OS for NVIDIA cards)
- 1200 Watt Power Supply
- Corsair Obsidian 800D Chassis
- Two GeForce GTX 580 graphics cards
These are some pretty nifty parts and bare in mind, when you opt multi-GPU gaming, always have your gear right. You'll need that quality power supply, you'll need that beefy motherboard and processor and then, you'll need a chassis with some very decent airflow keeping the graphics cards nicely chilled down.
For today's test we'll use two reference GeForce GTX 580 cards.
These cards are both clocked at the reference 772 MHz on the core and 4000 MHz (effective) on the memory. So we are looking at reference performance today. Later on in the article we'll also cover the two cards overclocked in SLI mode (which is interesting by the way).
So we use two of these in SLI at reference clock frequencies. We use the GeForce Forceware 262.99 beta driver.
On ATI's side we advise you to mostly compare them to the new 6800 series, as these are fully up-to date with Catalyst 10.10 drivers and the very latest Crossfire profile patch to be certain that Crossfire profiles are working properly in all games.
All graphics cards have been tested in the very same PC. The one difference is that we have a multi-boot SSD setup with the OS and applications cloned to each SSD, one for ATI cards and one for NVIDIA card. The OS on both clones is identical and all patched up. So there literally is no difference in-between our test setups other then the graphics cards and their respective drivers.
Okay let's head on over to the testing zone ...
