ASUS Sabertooth 990FX Motherboard Review

NVIDIA SLI Scaling 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.

The ASUS Sabertooth 990FX motherboard was able to edge out the MSI 990FXA-GD80 once we added the second MSI NVIDIA GTX 560Ti. At 1280×1024 the ASUS saw a performance gain of 90.9% while the MSI counterpart gained 88.9%. Cranking up the resolution to 1920×1080 the ASUS Sabertooth saw a gain of 92.1% while the MSI 990FXA-GD80 saw a gain of 90.8%.

In Total War: Shogun 2 the ASUS Sabertooth 990FX was once again able to edge out the performance of the MSI 990FXA-GD80. Looking closer at the numbers the ASUS Sabertooth 990FX started out at 70.46 frames per second with a single 560Ti and jumped to 90.24 frames per second with a second card in SLI. That’s a gain of 28.1% at 1280×1024 while the MSI 990FXA-GD80 saw a gain of 27.1%. While the scaling performance at 1280×1024 isn’t stellar, we do see much better gains at 1920×1080. At 1920×1080 the ASUS Sabertooth 990FX had a single card performance of 51.99 frames per second and jumped to 80.89 frames per second in SLI. That is a gain of 55.6% for the Sabertooth 990FX while the MSI 990FXA-GD80 saw a gain of 54.2%.

The single card performance of the ASUS Sabertooth 990FX was right on par with the MSI 990FXA-GD80. The ASUS Sabertooth 990FX was once again able to edge out the MSI motherboard. At 1280×1024 the Sabertooth 990FX saw a gain of 14.3% compared to the 12.4% gain of the MSI 990FXA-GD80. The gains we saw at 1920×1080 were significantly better. In single card configuration the ASUS Sabertooth 990FX averaged 82.6 frames per second across three runs. Across the same three runs the Sabertooth 990FX averaged 107.1 frames per second in SLI. That is a jump of 29.7% which is 2.5% more than the MSI 990FXA-GD80.

The performance we saw with the NVIDIA SLI scaling today wasn’t what I had hoped to see. I would have liked to have seen a little better scaling than we did. I would most likely attribute this to drivers. These are the first drivers that support SLI on an AMD platform and will likely take a few driver revisions to work out a few kinks.