Gaming performance

Given that one of the major gaming focuses of NVIDIA's nForce chipsets is its SLI capabilities, we've taken a look at how the Striker II NSE handles both single board and SLI configurations in a couple of current game titles using a 512MB GeForce 8800 GT graphics board.  First up is Valve's Half-Life 2: Episode Two, at a resolution of 1600x1200 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering enabled.

While we see no performance difference between the two boards in a single board configuration, with SLI enabled and two GeForce 8800 GTs in use the Striker II NSE and Extreme both grab a small but noticeable lead over the nForce 780i-based motherboard.

Now, let's test OpenGL performance on these two motherboards, courtesy of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, again using the same general image quality settings.

Again, we see the two nForce 790i Striker II offerings hold a distinct advantage in an SLI configuration, although whether this is due to the higher clocked memory we're using on these boards or some of the new SLI-centric functionality available to the nForce 790i chipset is difficult to say.

Audio performance

While 3D positional audio is not the focus of on-board audio, and matters have been confused under Windows Vista anyway due to changes in the way DirectSound-based audio is handled in this new Operating System, the performance impact of normal, bog-standard 2D sound is still worth a look across our two platforms to see how things shape up.  Thus, we've employed RightMark 3D Sound to benchmark the CPU utilisation of 2D audio on our systems under Windows Vista.

All three of these motherboards use the same audio solution so it's no surprise to see no performance difference between these two motherboards.