Power and System Setup

Power Consumption

We made the assumption that because NVIDIA’s 780i employed the nForce 200 companion chip, boards based on the platform would naturally suck down more power. It turns out that the nForce 200 doesn’t add as much to the power budget after all, though.




In fact, our ASUS Striker II Formula put out numbers very similar to the EVGA nForce790i Ultra SLI.

System Setup

Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 (3.16 GHz)

EVGA nForce 790i Ultra SLI A1 (790i Ultra SLI)
ASUS Striker II Formula (780i SLI)

2GB OCZ Technology DDR3-2000 CAS9 Memory (2x1GB) EPP 2.0
2GB OCZ Technology DDR2-1066 CAS5 Memory (2x1GB) EPP 1.0

2 x EVGA GeForce 8800 GT in SLI

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB SATA 3 Gbps Hard Drive

Windows Vista x32 Service Pack 1, current as of April 5th, 2008 with Windows Update

DirectX 10

Desktop resolution 1600x1200, 32-bit color, 85Hz refresh

We disable Vista’s UAC and generate an image using Norton Ghost 11 to create the same basic benchmark platform for each test bed. The image is frozen with the latest Windows Updates and deployed to each system. The appropriate drivers are then loaded to the machines.

We tested the 790i in a couple of different configurations. First, we used the EPP 2.0 profile of our OCZ modules to test performance with high-speed memory. Then, we dropped the modules to 1333 MHz to see how things changed at synchronous settings and lower latencies. The overclocked configuration is included, of course, as are the 780i comparison numbers running EPP 1.0 memory modules.

Benchmarks

SiSoft Sandra
3DMark06
Unreal Tournament III
Crysis
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition
Half-Life 2: Episode 2
Company of Heroes
PCMark Vantage
Windows Media Encoder
HDTach