NVIDIA nForce 790i SLI Ultra and GeForce 9800 GX2

For our next set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with Crysis and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. When testing processors with Crysis or ET:QW, we drop the resolution to 800x600, and reduce all of the in-game graphical options to their minimum values to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible.  However, the in-game effects, which control the level of detail for the games' physics engines and particle systems, are left at their maximum values, since these actually do place some load on the CPU rather than GPU.

The nForce 790i SLI Ultra-based EVGA and ASUS motherboard outperformed every other platform in the low-resolution Crysis CPU benchmark.  They didn't fare quite as well in the Enemy Territory benchmark, but their performance was still very good.  In the low-resolution ETQW test, the X48 put up a slightly higher framerate, but the 790i SLI Ultras did finish ahead of the older nForce chipsets.