ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe

Review Pages

1. Introduction
2. The mainboard - Packaging
3. ASUS Extreme N6600GT - SLI enabled
4. A look in the past
5. Installation
6. Test System
7. 3DMark05
8. 3DMark 2003
9. Codecreatures
10. Half life 2
11. Doom 3
12. Far Cry
13. Thief 3
14. Colin McRae 05
15. Ground Control II
16. Other Motherboard Benchmarks
17. BIOS & Overclocking
18. Bundled Software & Overclocking
19. GPU Overclocking
20. Conclusion

ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe - Page 3

- ASUS Extreme N6600GT - SLI enabled

For the requirements of this review, we used two ASUS Extreme N6600GT graphic cards. In the following table you can see the main features of this SLI enabled card. An NVidia based card, it differs from all other 6600GT cards by having slightly increased clock speeds (from 500MHz to 515MHz).

Main Features
GPU	Nvidia 6600GT - NV43
Memory Type	128MB 128-bit DDR3
Memory Speed	515MHz
Core Speed	515MHz
Memory Bandwidth	16.0 GB/sec
Pixel Pipelines	8x1
Vertex Pipelines	3
DX Support	9.0
OpenGL Support	1.5
Output	VGA/ DVI-I / D-Sub
Bus	PCI Express 16x (requires 2 expansion slots to fit)
Processing technology	0.11 micron

The heart of this card is the NV43 graphics processor that includes support for Shader Model 3.0, 64-bit texture filtering and blending, 32-bit pixel shader precision and UltraShadow II. The NV43 has a 128-bit memory interface, up to 256MB of memory (the graphics cards we used had 128MB of 128-bit DDR3 memory).

The NV43 offers eight pixel pipelines and three vertex shaders. It has a native PCI Express/SLI interface. You might notice the small SLI connectors (goldfingers). These are used to connect the cards together and merge their performance in SLI mode.

It should be reminded that this graphics card received CDRInfo's "Best Buy Award" for its overclocking capabilities and overall performance, considering the price an end user should pay to purchase an ASUS Extreme N6600GT.

Let us now see what SLI is and how it works...