Test Systems

Crossfire/X1800XT single/ 7800GTX:
AMD Athlon64 FX55 CPU
2x512mb DDR 3200 (2-2-2-5)
Samsung 80Gb 7200rpm 8mb Cache Sata Drive
Sony DWD22a DVDRW drive
Enermax 535w PSU
ATI Reference Crossfire Motherboard
X1800XT 512mb master and slave cards
X850 XT 256 master and slave cards
Geforce 7800GTX 512mb

7800GT SLI/ 7800 GTX SLI:
AMD Athlon64 FX55 CPU
2x512mb DDR 3200 (2-2-2-5)
Samsung 80Gb 7200rpm 8mb Cache Sata Drive
Sony DWD22a DVDRW drive
Enermax 535w PSU
Asus A8N32-SLI Dlx
2xGeforce 7800 GT 256mb
2xGeforce 7800 GTX 256mb

NEC-Mitsubishi MultiSync FP1355 22" CRT Monitor

Windows XP SP2
.Net FW 1.1 sp1
Catalyst 5.13 WHQL
Forceware 81.98 WHQL

The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows XP was installed. Following the completion of the installation, the Intel/ATI drivers were installed. The only updates applied were SP2 and .NET Framework 1.1 (latest service pack). Next, the latest builds of the benchmarking tools were installed and finally, the hard drive was de-fragmented. For each test, the ATI drivers were set to default quality/optimizations (unless otherwise stated).

Good Benchmarking Practice:

Where possible, each benchmark was performed 3 times and the median result for each resolution/setting is shown in the tables that will follow. All games/applications had their latest patches applied.

No 512mb 7800’s in SLI?:

Unfortunately we were unable to source two 512mb GTX’s for this article (including trying to buy them online) so we were limited to using 256mb cards in SLI. Obviously if you are able to get your hands on the 512mb models you’ll see a reasonable increase in performance over the 256mb model in SLI and this should be taken into account when viewing the results.