|
Page 5 of 7 

Synthetic Benchmarks To give you some of the performance figures of the NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GX2 we have been able to use one of the first Quad SLI systems that was custom build. Due to the time constrains we have focused our performance analysis runs towards the Futuremark benchmark suites. These will however provide a good indication on the game play of today's games. Now that we know to what the benchmark scores will relate to, it is time to dig into the results... We fired up the system powered by the AMD dula core processor and give it a spin around the benchmarks suites. So let's run the benchies and see what they bring in terms of performance.

| Benchmark Results - 1024x768 - 1GB RAM | | GeForce 7900 GX2 (Single) | 3DMark03 Score | | 500/1210MHz (Ref) | 29001 | | 567/1430MHz (Overclock) | 32329 | | GeForce 7900 GX2 (Quad SLI) | 3DMark03 Score | | 500/1210MHz (Ref) | 34640 | | 567/1430MHz (Overclock) | 36736 | | | | | Benchmark Results - 1024x768 - 2GB RAM | | GeForce 7900 GX2 (Quad SLI) | 3DMark03 Score | | 567/1430MHz (Overclock) | 36759 |
We started of the synthetic performance analysis by giving 3DMark03 a spin with the GeForce 7900 GX2 equipped system. With 3DMark03 build around the DirectX 8.1 and 9.0 specifications it will show us the performance that can be expected for some of the older games. The GX2 marks a very nice score, but take into account that this is already an SLI config. When adding another GX2 and going for a full Quad SLI we only see a minor increase, this linked mostly due to the CPU that can't deliver enough data to show of the real potential.

| Benchmark Results - 1024x768 - 1GB RAM | | GeForce 7900 GX2 (Single) | 3DMark05 Score | | 500/1210MHz (Ref) | 12915 | | 567/1430MHz (Overclock) | 13411 | | GeForce 7900 GX2 (Quad SLI) | 3DMark05 Score | | 500/1210MHz (Ref) | 12797 | | 567/1430MHz (Overclock) | 13075 | | | | | Benchmark Results - 1024x768 - 2GB RAM | | GeForce 7900 GX2 (Quad SLI) | 3DMark05 Score | | 567/1430MHz (Overclock) | 13193 |
Moving on, we ran 3DMark05 to see what influence the GX2 has on this benchmark suite. This is the first benchmark to require a DirectX 9.0 compliant hardware with support for Pixel Shaders 2.0 or higher. Again the GeForce 7900 GX2 puts down a decent score, however when applying a second GX2 in Quad SLI it doesn't do much good. This is quite strange as we are going from two GPU's in SLI to four GPU's in Quad SLI, but no performance gain whatsoever.

| Benchmark Results - 1280x1024 - 1GB RAM | | GeForce 7900 GX2 (Single) | 3DMark06 Score | | 500/1210MHz (Ref) | 7924 | | 567/1430MHz (Overclock) | 8567 | | GeForce 7900 GX2 (Quad SLI) | 3DMark06 Score | | 500/1210MHz (Ref) | 8492 | | 567/1430MHz (Overclock) | 8865 | | | | | Benchmark Results - 1280x1024 - 2GB RAM | | GeForce 7900 GX2 (Quad SLI) | 3DMark06 Score | | 567/1430MHz (Overclock) | 8866 |
Finally we have the performance reported by 3DMark06 which was released at the start of the year. The 3DMark06 tests include all new HDR/SM3.0 graphics tests, SM2.0 graphics tests, AI and physics driven single and multiple cores or processor CPU tests and a collection of comprehensive feature tests to reliably measure next generation gaming performance today. A quite good score reported by the GeForce 7900 GX2, but again Quad SLI doesn't bring much added value in terms of gaming performance. During all our benchmarks runs we also overclocked the GeForce 7900 GX2 and we could bump the core and memory to a stable 567/1430MHz. The overclocking isn't bad at all considering that we are talking about a SLI and Quad SLI setup were we overclocked all GPU's to the same level. Overclocking the GeForce 7900 GX2 proved to be quite good and from the benchmarks scores we can see a nice increase in performance. Once again the NVIDIA cores do have some potential that can be addressed by power hungry overclockers. 
|