Gaming

Our gaming tests set out to find games that were heavily CPU dependent in order to test for platform differences.  Games at higher resolutions with more emphasis on the GPU won’t show us any differences, if they exist.

Call of Duty 2 v1.20

We ran CoD2 at 1024×768 with the GPU settings at Medium.

Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 nForce 570 SLI Motherboard Review - Motherboards 42

Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 nForce 570 SLI Motherboard Review - Motherboards 43

Oblivion

Oblivion is a very GPU dependant game. To test the SLI capability, Oblivion was run in both single and SLI configuration and Fraps was used to gather average frames per second data, on a manual walkthrough segment in an outdoor game environment.

Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 nForce 570 SLI Motherboard Review - Motherboards 44

Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 nForce 570 SLI Motherboard Review - Motherboards 45

3DMark06

Since some users still like to use 3DMark06 as a reference for performance, it will be included in this review.

Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 nForce 570 SLI Motherboard Review - Motherboards 46

The GIGABYTE once again showed itself capable of holding its ground. Yes, it held only very slight leads, but considering the board it’s compared against is quite a bit more expensive, the advantage is greater than just the slight leads it’s showing in the benchmarks. At this time it’s hard to tell whether the SLI performance in Vista is accurate (Vista sometimes has issues properly configuring the second GPU for dual GPU use). I ran these tests using the latest Nvidia drivers, and the Microsoft SLI hotfix in an attempt to acquire the most accurate data possible.

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