Processor(s): Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3.33GHz (366MHz x 9 / 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 7200RPM SATA 2 Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2 Drivers: nVidia ForceWare 93.71 and DX9c
With two GeForce 7600GT’s in hand from XFX there was only one thing to do, slap them both into our ABIT IN9 32X-MAX 680i SLI motherboard and see what happens when these bad boys get together and party in dual graphics mode.
Like we said earlier, with the new GeForce 8600 and 8500 coming out from nVidia, we should see a flurry of 7600GT’s hit the second hand market (as well as probably cheaper on shop shelves), with XFX we are able to see what kind of performance increase you will get with a second 7600GT in SLI mode - not only that though, we will see how the 7600GT overclocked “Fatal1ty” edition from XFX performs itself and sum it all up.
Last month (March 2nd) nVidia released their ForceWare 101.41 Vista driver which enabled SLI dual graphics under Microsoft’s latest OS for the GeForce 6 and 7 series GPU’s (but not DX10) but because still the vast majority of our readers are still using Windows XP, we won’t be providing Vista benchmarks at this stage. At the same time though, it’s good to know if you want to run these XFX cards in SLI mode, you can do so under Windows Vista now.
Let’s not ramble anymore and see what kind of performance increase we get by putting two of these bad boys together for some SLI fun!
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.
Straight off the mark we can see that we get a significant increase across the board when we move to SLI mode.
