MSI 990FXA-GD80 Motherboard Review – AMD 990FX Chipset

NVIDIA SLI Performance Scaling

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.

For a first run out with NVIDIA SLI Technology the MSI 990FXA-GD80 we are seeing some great number. In Aliens Vs. Predator at 1280×1024 a single MSI N560GTX-TI HAWX was able to average 50.6 frames per second. Tossing in the second MSI card we were able to jump up to 95.6 frames per second for an 88.9% increase in performance. Increasing the resolution to 1920×1080 a single card averaged 36.9 frames per second while running two of them in SLI averaged 70.4 frames per second. that’s a 90.8% increase in performance.

Total War: Shogun to didn’t scale as well at 1280×1024 as it did at 1920×1080. At 1280×1024 we saw a gain of 27.1%. Cranking up the resolution to 1920×1080 we saw a gain of 54.2% which is much more impressive.

The MSI 990FXA-GD80 only saw a gain of 12.4% at 1280×1024 in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat. That number more than doubled though when we cranked up the resolution to 1920×1080 as we saw a gain of 27.2%..

The performance we saw with the NVIDIA SLI scaling today wasn’t what I had hoped to see. I would have liked to see 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.