Epox, Intel with 6800 GS SLI makes Doom 3 90+ percent faster

INTEL is a rather interesting gaming platform. Until Conroe comes in the market, it will be the gamer's second option. It is good for gaming but AMD is still a better choice. Most of the motherboard manufacturers believe that you need to support both. We are sure that none of the motherboard manufactures outsold its AMD SLI boards with Intel ones but still everyone makes it. Some people simply want Intel only and you have to give them an SLI chance.

Epox made such a board and calls it the EP-5NVA+ SLI. It is a rather packed Nforce 4 SLI for Intel motherboard. It features support for all socket 775 CPU's, including the Celerons and Extreme expensive editions. You can also know this chipset as a combination of C19 Northbridge and MCP04 Southbridge. The board supports dual core CPUs and FSB 1066 is piece of cake for it.
EP-5NVA+ SLI Nforce 4 for Intel motherboard

It supports dual channel memory marchitecture and it supports DDR 2 400 and 533 memory. It has two PCIe 16X slots working at 8X mode, two PCI slots and two PCIe 1X. The board supports two IDE ports with up to four IDE devices and four SATA 2 slots for four devices. It has support for RAID SATA, two Firewire 400 Bbps ports, hardware monitoring for CPU, system fan, system temperature. It has connectors for PS2 keyboard and mouse, floppy, parallel, serial ATA and IrDA devices and ten USB 2.0 ports. The board features Realtek 2, 6 or 8 CH audio with ALC850 chip that support many audio ins and outs including SPDIF, or analogue out.

Nvidia offers Firewall and Active Armor in its chipset and the board features one Gigabit Ethernet card from Vitesse VSC8201RX. The board has Post Port LED diagnostic display and very powerful overclocking bios. The board comes with bunch of cables including 8 mini heatsinks for some of the power transistors, screwdriver and impossible lot of extension cables and ports. We overclocked 3.8 GHz CPU to 4.2 GHz without any real effort and the board was running fast.

The board is really packed with some nice features and we didn't have any issues to install or work with the machine. We used Pentium 3.8 GHz and one GB of DDR 533 memory from Corsair.

XFX 6800 GS with Gainward 6800 GS card in Epox Nforce 4 for Intel motherboard

We plugged two different 6800 GS cards in the machine and tested it versus a single 6800GS card. We used Gainward 6800GS clocked at 425 MHz core and 1000 MHz memory and compared the scores versus SLI 6800GS where XFX 6800 GS worked at 485 MHz core and 1100 MHz memory. The second card, Gainward 6800 GS automatically overclocked to match the XFX speed and ended up at 485 MHz core speed and 1100 MHz memory. We like that Nvidia chose to overclock the other card rather to slow it down. It is a positive step I think as it will make your system faster. We wrote about this a while ago and you can read it here.

Benchmarketing: We compared :
Gainward 7800GS Ultra/3400 PCX 420/1000MHz
XFX Geforce 6800GS 485 MHz / 1100 MHz

Our test machine includes:
Pentium 4 3.8 GHz 570J single core
Epox Nforce 4 for Intel EP-5NVA+ SLI motherboard
2x512 MB Corsair DDR 2 553 TWIN2X1024-5400C4 memory
Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400GB SATA NCQ hard drive
Cooler Master socket 775 cooler
Akasa Power plus 650 W AK-P650FF-V2 Power Supply Unit

Doom 3	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200	2048x1536
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	82.3	74.0	61.8	32.3
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	81.7	81.9	79.7	61.6
Doom 3 High Quality FSAA 4X + Aniso 8X	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200	2048x1536
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	65.5	46.4	34.0	15.1
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	79.9	73.5	61.4	32.3
Far Cry	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200	2048x1536
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	65.24	66.50	65.12	32.24
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	65.26	65.19	65.55	57.63
Far Cry High Quality FSAA 4X + Aniso 8X	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200	2048x1536
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	65.67	55.39	39.77	15.22
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	65.81	64.46	63.04	23.27
Half Life 2	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200	2048x1536
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	49.91	50.19	47.85	34.10
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	49.02	47.49	46.81	46.03
Half Life 2 High Quality FSAA 4X + Aniso 8X	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200	2048x1536
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	49.67	45.86	39.60	26.14
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	48.85	46.76	45.37	38.92
Quake 4	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200	2048x1536
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	108.2	93.6	75.2	0
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	113.3	111.8	107.8	0
Quake 4 High Quality FSAA 4X + Aniso 8X	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200	2048x1536
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	93.0	69.1	52.0	0
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	108.2	103.0	95.3	0
FEAR	1024x768	1280x960	1600x1200	2048x1536
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	58	41	29	15
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	96	78	58	29
FEAR High Quality FSAA 4X + Aniso 16X	1024x768	1280x960	1600x1200	2048x1536
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	30	21	14	6
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	61	40	27	11
Battlefield 2	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200	2048x1536
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	72.1	57.7	46.7	31.6
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	72.3	71.8	69.6	54.8
Battlefield 2 High Quality FSAA 4X + Aniso 8X	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200	2048x1536
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	54.0	41.0	30.7	18.4
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	70.1	66.7	49.6	33.6
Composite Figures 3Dmark 03	3DMark 03	Game2	Game3	Nature
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	12028	90.0	75.6	70.3
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	21692	186.6	149.6	136.3
CPU Test	CPU Score	CPU Test 1	CPU Test 2
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	977	108.6	17.4	30.8
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	948	106.4	16.7	30.8
Composite Figures 3Dmark 03	Single Texturinng	Multi Textur.	Vertex Shader	Pixel Shader 2.0
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	3224.0	4983.9	31.7	169.5
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	7058.7	11232.9	62.7	351.8
Composite Figures 3Dmark 05	3DMark 05	Game1	Game2	Game3
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	5151	23.6	14.6	25.5
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	8495	33.7	22.8	51.1
CPU Test	CPU Score	CPU Test 1	CPU Test 2
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	5283	2.8	4.4	30.8
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	5134	2.7	4.4	30.8
Composite Figures 3Dmark 05	Single Texturinng	Multi Textur.	Pixel Shader	VS /VS complex
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	3740.0	5066.8	141.5	45.8/35.8
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	8174.0	11175.3	321.2	103.8/78.8
PC Mark 2004 EPOX 5NVA+SLI	CPU	Memory	HDD	Total
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	5797	5584	5296	5718
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	5816	5600	5280	5725
PC Mark 2005 EPOX 5NVA+SLI	CPU	Memory	HDD	Total
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	4725	4446	5399	4651
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	4792	4532	5522	4697
Sandra 2005 EPOX 5NVA+SLI	CPU	Memory	Multimedia
Gainward 6800GS 425/1000 MHz	11158	4722	27339
	8006	4713	36178
SLI 6800GS - XFX+Gainward 485/1100	11139	4714	27327
	8045	4707	36158

It is natural that two 6800 GS cards can outperform the single card. At 1600x1200 two cards are almost 20 FPS faster while at 2048x1536 two cards are more than 90 percent faster. You can play Doom 3 at the highest resolution and still have more than 60FPS. Once you turn on the FSAA and Aniso the difference is even bigger. Even at 1280 two cards are almost seventy percent faster while it gets even to more than 100 percent performance incensement. I think this is a golden throne of SLI's performance.

Far Cry is even until you get to the highest resolution. It beats the single card by roughly eighty percent. Naturally the difference is much bigger at 1600x1200 FSAA 4X and Aniso 8X where you 24 FPS difference and almost 60 FPS with two cards at 2048.

Half Life 2 only shows the difference at the highest resolution, where you get some 12 FPS difference while it's tight at all the other resolutions, or sometimes the single 6800 GS is faster than two. It is completely CPU bounded test but once you turn FSAA and Aniso the difference is there again but only at highest resolutions. We again get to this magical 12 FPS number.

Quake 4 can show the difference and two cards are significantly faster in 1280 and 1600 than a single card. We are talking 32 FPS faster while the difference is even greater with FSAA and Aniso on. At 1600x1200 Quake 4 runs 83 percent faster than a single card, it sure is a nice boost.

The FEAR feast on performance and it loves SLI. Even without effects it manages to be 38 FPS faster even at 1024x768 or 60 per cent faster. The trend continues and at higher resolutions it's twice as fast, so yes 100 percent faster. At least we thought that you can not get that much performance but then we realised that single card tests are based at 420 MHz core clock while two cards are running at two times 485 MHz. Therefore even more than 100 percent performance incensement is the valid score.

FEAR with FSAA and Aniso shows 103 percent performance incensement. It stays very fast in all resolutions.

Battlefield 2 shows a difference especially at the higher resolutions. It can be up to 20 frames faster while with FSAA and Aniso on it shows a great difference and runs 71 percent faster at 1024x768, 58 percent faster at 1280x1024 or 61 per cent at 1600x1200. It sure shows the SLI in the right light.

3Dmark03 loves SLI on this Epox SLI motherboard it shows 9000 marks difference from a single card. That's a lot. Some scores are twice as fast as a single slower clocked card again due the superior clock of the two cards.

3Dmark05 shows a 3300 marks difference again a nice performance boost while PC mark shows a slight difference as an advantage of an SLI system. PCmark 05 proves the thesis and shows that SLI with two cards runs slightly faster than a single card system.

Sandra 2005 shows a slightly slower score when you turn the SLI on. It is very small difference as the memory runs some 8 MB/s slower than without it. Overall it's a very fast, good and stabile motherboard.

Conclusion

We think that Epox did a good job with its Pentium 4 SLI motherboard. We were sceptical about Pentium 4 SLI and playing games but Epox and Nvidia actually did a great job making a nice and desirable product. It offers, fast, stabile and good motherboard that is capable of running two cards in SLI. You can plug all Pentium CPUs inside but we didn't have any Intel dual core to compare in this system. It works just fine with fastest of the Netburst Pentium 4 3.8 GHz.

Two 6800GS in a machine makes a perfect sense. It's not that expensive and it will significantly boost your graphic performances. If you have a Pentium 4 and a SLI motherboard you can get a single 6800 GS today and update in few months and get up to 90 or even 100 performance increase.

I can see some of the Nvidia sales people using nasty INQ to say that adding a second 6800 GS card in an SLI will boost the performance to up to 103 percent in FEAR. It's called marketing and that is precisely why we call this benchmarketing.

After all there is a chance for a nice gaming on Pentium 4 made by Epox and powered with XFX and Gainward 6800 GS cards. Who would have thought so? As all you can see these days are Nforce 4 or Radeon Xpress Crossfire boards for AMD CPU's.

Tested by Sanjin Rados and Fuad Abazovic. µ