Gaming Performance: GeForce 9800 GTX 3-Way SLI

Three-way SLI is significantly more demanding on the system and it shows here in Crysis – the QX9770 pulls out a solid 14 frames per second (or 46 percent) advantage over the nForce 780i SLI board. This takes things from "virtually playable" to "very smooth."

The QX9770 seems to work far better with the 790i than the 780i, but that might be partly because the 780i doesn't officially support 1,600MHz FSB processors. On the 780i both the E8500 and QX9770 perform about the same, but there's quite a bit of difference with the 790i.


In much the same way, but to an even higher degree, the difference between 790i and 780i is even more in favour of the newer DDR3 board in World in Conflict. The 790i is over twice as fast with a QX9770 and the minimum framerate is noticeably higher too. The E8500 isn't that far behind, although it is still several frames per second slower on average. In comparison, the 780i with E8500 is barely playable with a very low minimum FPS and just 25fps on average and again like in Crysis, the 780i performs slightly better with the E8500 than QX9770.


For a change, Call of Duty 4 with is DX9 engine seems to be less intensive and the 780i performance is closer to the 790i, but it's still on average slower with both CPUs by a few fps.


The 790i again performs a few frames per second faster than the 780i – there's not much difference between the two with the QX9770 installed, but with the E8500 CPU the 780i SLI board drops several fps behind.