EVGA Z68 FTW 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.

Single card performance in the Aliens Vs Predator doesn’t vary a whole lot. At 1280×1024 there is a 4% variance between all of our systems. Once we fired up the second MSI N560GTX-Ti HAWX we started to see some differences in the systems. The ASUS P9X79 Pro saw a boost of 86.5% while the EVGA Z68 FTW saw a gain of 87.5% in SLI. Firing up the Aliens Vs. Predator benchmark up at 1920×1080 the EVGA Z68 FTW saw a gain of 90.3% while the system with the top performance (frames per second) saw a gain of 87.2%

Once again we didn’t see much of a performance difference between the systems in the single card configurations. Running the systems in SLI we see some slight differences in the scaling. At 1280×1024 the EVGA Z68 FTW gained 78% running in SLI and was the second fastest machine of the bunch. Running the systems at 1920×1080 the EVGA Z68 FTW saw a gain of 76.4% and had an average frame rate of 50.29 frames per second in Metro 2033.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat really showed us a difference between the platforms when running our MSI N560GTX-Ti’s in NVIDIA SLI. Though the performance in the single card configurations between our systems was nearly interchangeable. The new Intel X79 platform was the top performer of them all. The EVGA Z68 FTW came in a bit behind the X79 at both resolutions. At 1280×1024 the EVGA Z68 FTW pulled 185.3 frames per second in SLI which is a gain of 51.1%. At 1920×1080 the EVGA Z68 FTW picked up 60.1 frames per second in SLI which is a solid gain of 72.1%.