DFI LanParty nF4 SLI-DR Review

Unreal Tournament 2004. For this benchmark we used a multi-player demo called Primeval. If you wish to try the demo out for yourself it can be downloaded from the following website or ask me and I'll send you a copy. The timedemo is similar to the one used in Quake III in that once the demo is over you pull down the console to see the average FPS.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. This game has some awesome graphics and is primed for use with next generation video cards. The only drawback is that the game comes with no default timedemo, so we recorded one and used the 2.0 shader for the benchmark. For those of you wanting to try this benchmark for yourself we'll make the demo available, simply drop us a line.

Far Cry. This game is very similar to Serious Sam in that the maps are huge and have a ton of things to shoot. Granted the graphics are quite a bit better and the water textures are something to die for. For this benchmark we used the regulator demo and the following command line. "FarCry.exe -DEVMODE "#demo_num_runs=1" "#demo_quit=1" "#r_Width=800" "#r_Height=600" "map regulator" "demo regulator""

XviD Movie Encoding Test: This is a new test that was added to cover other sections of real-world performance. The test consists of a simple task of encoding a DVD rip from VOB to AVI with AutoGK 1.25 using the XviD codec. The movie used is the first chapter of Dirty Pair Flash #2 and consisted of 40104 frames. The time shown is how many frames per second were processed during the first pass to encode the video files.

The best of the best when it comes to real world benchmarks, this free program is available from eTesting Labs and uses real programs to test the overall performance of your computer. These programs include: Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1, Adobe Premiere 6.50, Macromedia Director MX 9.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 6.1, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980, NewTek's LightWave 3D 7.5b, and Steinberg WaveLab 4.0f.

Business Winstone is quite similar to the Content Creation benchmark but uses programs that you would most likely use in the office. These programs include Microsoft Access 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Excel 2002 SP-2, Microsoft FrontPage 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Outlook 2002 SP-2, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Project 2002, Microsoft Word 2002 SP-2, WinZip 8.1 SR-1, and Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003.

Finally some variance in benchmark numbers though sadly not exactly what we were expecting. If you look at the benchmark numbers the first set is the LanParty board with SLI enabled, on select benchmarks we re-ran the benchmark with only a single card installed to see if there were any changes in performance, the resolution remained the same and was set low on purpose.

Pretty much across the board when it comes to video performance the Chaintech reference system came out on top. To our surprise the LanParty board running dual cards running SLI came in at or below the same system running only a single card. Granted this tells us we are CPU limited here but also goes to show how much CPU time is used to calculate and run SLI especially in Split Frame Rendering mode (SFR) (as used in FarCry).

Office apps used in our Winstone tests were immune to the effects of SLI mostly due to the lack of having a profile configured for those applications..