Crysis Warhead is a standalone expansion pack of the original Crysis. It uses an enhanced version of the same engine.
There was no significant gain when adding a third GTX260, but SLI did provide a great increase.
Bioshock is a creepy first person shooter. It is the oldest of the games in our benchmarking suite, hence the high FPS.
Bioshock scaled very well with the increasing number of videocards, scoring over 300 FPS at maximum settings, 1920x1200.
Far Cry 2
Far Cry 2 is another first person shooter. It has been developed by Ubisoft compared to the first one who has been made by Crytek. The story takes place in Africa, where the ultimate goal is to assassinate an arms dealer.
The third card decreased the scores slightly.
Left 4 Dead
Left 4 Dead is a first-person shooter developed by Valve. It uses the Source Engine. Four survivors must fight against infected people in order to reach a safe area.
The same thing happened in Left 4 Dead.
3DMark Vantage
In case one does not know 3DMark Vantage, it is the successor to 3DMark 06. It does not have a free version yet, so one must have a license to use it. The second CPU test is PhysX enabled, however the general consensus is we disable it in the options. To be accepted on benchmarking websites like HWBot.org or the ORB, it must be disabled anyway.
Obviously, in 3DMark Vantage the third card increases the score.
Conclusion
The NF980-G65 and the Phenom II yielded great scores when equipped of a pair of GTX260s, however the 3-Way SLI setup had a positive scaling only in Bioshock, apart from 3DMark. Scaling is an issue that affects both the green and the red camp; there are many games that suffer a decrease in performance past two GPUs. There was a hope to get past that with the Hydra 200 from Lucid Technologies, however it seems some video card manufacturer which I played with its products in this article did not want to see the MSI Big Bang motherboard hit the market. The gaming community - including me - really hopes that great technology gets available soon. But I diverge from the main point of this article now.
When I took a look at the MSI NF980-G65, I also talked about enabling SLI on non-NVIDIA motherboards. I had a great deal of interest in trying this out, so I said I would try it out myself. Well, if I would have managed to enable it, you would have seen the MSI 790FX-GD70 with 3-Way SLI in the previous graphs. I tried to do so on Windows Vista x64, Windows 7 x64 and even on XP x86, without any success. I just could not get the chipset to be recognized as Intel X58, which is part of the process, with this trick. There are many people out there who managed to do it on these three operating systems, however. For benchmarkers, it might be interesting to try it out, but I do not suggest buying components with the idea of unlocking SLI on them, because it appears to be fairly tricky. If one absolutely wants SLI along an AMD processor, getting the MSI NF980-G65 is the best solution.
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