EVGA nForce 680i SLI 775 A1 Motherboard Review

POV-Ray 3.7 Beta 13a

Processor Performance on Pov-Ray 3.7 Beta 13a:

The Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer was developed from DKBTrace
2.12 (written by David K. Buck and Aaron A. Collins) by a bunch of
people (called the POV-Team) in their spare time. It is an
high-quality, totally free tool for creating stunning three-dimensional
graphics. It is available in official versions for Windows, Mac OS/Mac
OS X and i86 Linux. The POV-Ray package includes detailed instructions
on using the ray-tracer and creating scenes. Many stunning scenes are
included with POV-Ray so you can start creating images immediately when
you get the package. These scenes can be modified so you do not have to
start from scratch. In addition to the pre-defined scenes, a large
library of pre-defined shapes and materials is provided. You can
include these shapes and materials in your own scenes by just including
the library file name at the top of your scene file, and by using the
shape or material name in your scene. Since this is free software feel
free to download this version and try it out on your own.

The most significant change from the end-user point of view between
versions 3.6 and 3.7 is the addition of SMP (symmetric multiprocessing)
support, which in a nutshell allows the renderer to run on as many
CPU’s as you have installed on your computer. This will be particularly
useful for those users who intend purchasing a dual-core CPU or who
already have a two (or more) processor machine. On a two-CPU system the
rendering speed in some scenes almost doubles. For our benchmarking we
used version 3.7 as all of the processors we are testing today are
dual-core.

Once rendering on the object we selected was completed, we took the
score from dialog box, which indicates the average PPS for the
benchmark. A higher PPS indicates faster system performance.

In our POV-Ray testing, the eVGA 680i board falls right in the middle of the pack. It is interesting to note that both the 680i boards here are outpaced by the 650i boards that are represented, though not by very much.