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Hardware

Our benchmark system consisted of the following:

• AMD Athlon 64 3000+ S939 @ 2.46 GHz (9.0 x 273.5 MHz, RAM 223.8 MHz)
• Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI motherboard (nForce 4 SLI)
• Reference NVIDIA 6600 GT
• Reference NVIDIA 6800 GT
• ATI Radeon X850 XT PE
• 2x512 MB OCZ PC4200 (Dual Channel)
• Western Digital WD1200JD 120 GB SATA
• OCZ ModStream 520W power supply

With today's modern video cards, the processor is increasingly becoming the bottleneck in many benchmarks. We use a heavily-overclocked Athlon 64 so as to remove it from the equation as much as possible.

Drivers

All of the NVIDIA cards were tested with Forceware 71.24 drivers on our overclocked Athlon 64 test bench. The ATI X850 XT PE was tested with Catalyst 4.12 drivers. A direct comparison will be done between the 3D1 and the 6600 GT, 6800 GT, and ATI's X850 XT PE, so as to either prove or disprove Gigabyte's claims as mentioned above.

Special drivers are not needed to enable the dual-GPU function of the 3D1 -- the regular Forceware suite is all that is needed. At first, we had some trouble enabling the "SLI" (dual GPU) feature on the 3D1 - the driver detected that our card was capable of SLI operation, but did not provide the checkbox to enable it. We tried re-installing the Forceware drivers, resulting in a grand achievement of nothing at all. We eventually completely removed the Forceware drivers, then used DriverHeaven's Driver Cleaner 3 to remove remnants of NVIDIA files. Re-installing the set again and rebooting finally resulted in the detection of the second "card" by Windows.

Benchmarks

• 3DMark 2005
• Aquamark 3
• Call of Duty
• Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Academy
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• Halo
• X2 Rolling Demo
• Splinter Cell
• Doom 3
• Half-Life 2

Note that for the X850 XT PE, we have an additional set of benchmarks labeled "Custom". These are 6x AA / 16x AF settings. NVIDIA does not have a directly comparable mode and therefore benchmarks in this column are not indicative of relative performance.