EVGA 790i FTW

Crysis Benchmark

The Crysis graphics engine remains the standard by which all new games, 3D engines, and graphics cards are judged. Highly detailed environments present massive loads to the PCI-E lanes and saturate the MCH and memory banks with a flood of data. Any system weakness or instability is often uncovered within the first loop of the Assault Demo.

UT3 Benchmark

The highly addictive Unreal Tournament 3 remains a favorite lab game to unwind from the rigors of putting products through their paces. The UT3 engine is highly sensitive to memory access latency, often showing gains favoring a tighter performance level (tRD) setting over outright FSB speeds. A fun and frantic online playing experience demands smooth frame rates with no slowdown under load. We chose to run the Coret_Fly demo due to its back-to-back performance consistency between runs.

Once again the 790i FTW fails to dominate other boards when it comes to standard single GPU performance. However, it's unlikely that users will be purchasing this board for single graphics card systems. Therefore we decided to strap a couple of GTX 280s into the board to see what is on show when we max out the Crysis graphical settings in SLI to see if playable frame rates are acceptable at 1920X1200 for those who have the money to burn.

4GHz with two GTX 280s in SLI will get you an average frame rate over 30fps, although you'll probably see some in game dips to around 15fps - still not what we'd call completely playable at maximum detail levels.