Falcon Northwest FragBox SLI: Dare to Dream

Synthetic Gaming

While some might argue otherwise, we really have trouble qualifying Futuremark's 3DMark applications as anything but synthetic benchmarks. They basically represent another potential 3D gaming engine, but unlike actual games, the engine is not used for anything in the real world. That doesn't make them useless, and they do provide yet another gauge of overall system performance. However, given the choice between 10% higher 3DMark scores and 10% higher scores in a real game, the latter would get our overwhelming vote.

















Our DFI system comes out on top by small margins in virtually every configuration, but there's nothing that we would really consider significant. Unlike PCMark, 3DMark depends almost exclusively on graphics card performance, and to a lesser degree on CPU performance. The CPU scores naturally focus more on that area, and the FragBox lags behind slightly in 3DMark03 CPU scores. In other tests, the tighter memory timings of the 1GB setup moves that configuration to the top of the charts. An odd twist is that the FragBox with the 7900 GT performs better in the CPU test of 3DMark05 than with the 7900 GTX; we are not entirely sure why that occurs, and we wouldn't place too much significance on it. These are synthetic benchmarks, and the end result is that we've once again basically got a tie.