ASUS Crosshair V Formula ‘Bulldozer’ Motherboard Review

NVIDIA SLI Gaming Performance

Now that the AMD 990FX chipset supports NVIDIA SLI, we decided to update the NVIDIA graphics cards for our SLI testing. In order to do this we contacted our friends over at MSI and they were kind enough to send over a pair of their NVIDIA GeForce N560GTX-Ti HAWX edition graphics cards.

Aliens Vs. Predator is the first test up for SLI on our ASUS Crosshair V Formula motherboard. Much like in CrossFireX there is very little performance difference between the Phenom II X6 1100T and the AMD FX-8150. The single card performance of the two systems were withing .1 frames per second at both resolutions. Once we fired up the second MSI GeForce N560GTX-Ti we were able to see a slight difference. At 1280×1024 the Phenom II X6 1100T was able to outperform the AMD FX-8150 by 1.3 frames per second. That’s a difference of ~1.4%. Increasing the resolution to 1920×1080 the Phenom II X6 1100T was once again the victor by .6 frames per second, a margin of .8%.

In Metro 2033 there is very little performance difference. Single card performance at both resolutions was within .05 frames per second at 1280×1024 and .01 frames per second at 1920×1080. Firing up the second MSI N560GTX-Ti the two systems each took the lead at one point. At 1280×1024 the AMD Phenom X6 1100T took the lead by .68 frames per second, or 1%. Increasing the resolution to 1920×1080 the AMD FX-8150 took the top honors by .54 frames per second, a margin of 1% as well.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat is the first of our game benchmarks to show a difference with a single MSI N560GTX-Ti installed. At 1280×1024 we saw a difference of 2.7 frames per second with the Phenom II X6 1100T in the lead with an average frame rate of 115.8. Single card performance isn’t the only test that we are seeing a performance difference. Tossing in the second NVIDIA GeForce 560GTX-Ti the Phenom II X6 1100T performance jumped from 115.8 frames per second to 132.2 frames per second. It isn’t a huge jump in performance by any means, though the AMD FX-8150 went from 113.1 frames per second to 118.1 frames per second. The difference between the two systems is what is significant, not necessarily the actual performance numbers.