Processor(s): Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3.33GHz (366MHz x 9 and FSB 1:1) Motherboard(s): Abit IN9 32X-MAX Wi-Fi (Supplied by Universal Abit) Memory: 2 X 1GB Crucial PC8000 5-5-5-15 (Supplied by Crucial) Hard Disk(s): Hitachi 80GB 7200-rpm SATA 2 Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2 Drivers: Nvidia ForceWare 158.16 and DX9c
Hot off the test bed from our single card article, the BFG Tech 8600GTS OC is back with a vengeance. Our plan of action looks a little something like this. We take our single card results and then slot in a second to see what kind of performance improvements we get using the SLI configuration. From there we pull the two cards out and install a 640MB MSI 8800GTS, which is about the same price as a pair of 8600GTS cards.
We run the cards through their paces and before we wrap things up with our Final Thoughts we see if overclocking is as easily done as in a single card environment, and look at what kind of gains we get in SLI.
We have also dropped the demo of Company of Heroes and moved to the full version updated to the latest patch, 1.5. This has helped remove the SLI issue we had with the demo.
Let us move on and see exactly what we have here from two of Nvidias newest graphics cards in SLI mode.
3DMark05 is now the second latest version in the popular 3DMark "Gamers Benchmark" series. It includes a complete set of DX9 benchmarks which tests Shader Model 2.0 and above.
For more information on the 3DMark05 benchmark, we recommend you read our preview here.
Our first synthetic benchmark sees that huge gains are seen over the single card solution and that SLI is slightly faster than a single 8800GTS across the board.
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