GIGABYTE Z68XP-UD3-iSSD Motherboard Review

NVIDIA SLI Scaling Performance

In order to update our NVIDIA SLI testing 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 performance of the GIGABYTE Z68XP-UD3-iSSD isn’t far off from what our other boards have done in Aliens Vs. Predator. At 1280×1024 the Z68XP-UD3-iSSD was able to hit 95.5 frames per second in SLI while the ASUS P8Z68-V Pro (which is the top board in this benchmark) was able to achieve 97.6 frames per second for a difference of ~2.2%. Cranking up the resolution to 1920×1080 the GIGABYTE Z68XP-UD3-iSSD saw a 1.3% difference.

Metro 2033 shows us that despite the fact that the GIGABYTE Z68XP-UD3-iSSD is considered and “entry level” motherboard, it is more than capable of keeping up with the “high end” motherboards. At 1280×1024 the Z68XP-UD3-iSSD was able to average 67.08 frames per second in SLI and 38.14 frames per second with a single MSI GeForce N560GTX-Ti HAWX edition graphics card. This is ever so slightly behind the ASUS P8Z68-V Pro average framerates of 68.01/38.32 and just ahead of the GIGABYTE Z68X-UD7-B3 averages of 66.5/37.57. Increasing the resolution to 1920×1080 the GIGABYTE Z68XP-UD3-iSSD fell to the bottom of the charts in SLI. With both of the MSI GeForce N560GTX-Ti HAWX Edition Graphics cards in SLI we saw an average framerate of 46.8 frames per second, though the single card performance was still in the middle of the pack with 27.39 frames per second.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat shows a slight dip in SLI Scaling. At 1280×1024 we saw a performance gain of 41.7% while the GIGABYTE Z68X-UD7-B3 saw a gain of 42.8% and the ASUS P8Z68-V Pro saw a gain of 50%. At 1920×1080 the GIGABYTE Z68XP-UD3-iSSD saw a gain of 63.4%, the GIGABYTE Z68X-UD7-B3 saw a gain of 65.1% and the ASUS P8Z68-V Pro saw a gain of 71.2%.