Exclusive: SLI Head-to-Head: Monarch Micro-ATX vs. Shuttle SFF

FEAR 1.03 Performance

The final game that we'll look at is FEAR, as it represents the most demanding game engine currently out there. Note that we don't say that it's the best looking game out there, but as you'll see in the results, it is definitely not CPU limited. We didn't have time to run benchmarks on all of the configurations for FEAR, and the 6800 GS would not run in SLI mode -- or rather, it would run, but the results were the same as running with a single card.

That represents one of the biggest problems with SLI: game executable detection/support. It could be that the latest patch broke support on lower NVIDIA cards. It's unfortunate that we can't see how the 6800 GS SLI compares to a single 7800 GTX. I tried five different driver versions from NVIDIA, including their latest beta drivers, and I tried various methods to force SLI support. The eVGA KO cards worked in SLI, after a few tweaks, but nothing that I did would enable SLI on the 6800 GS cards. We also have graphs for minimum frame rates as well as average frame rates, since FEAR conveniently reports that information. (We could list maximum frame rates as well, but that really doesn't matter nearly as much as the other two.)

How's that for graphically demanding game? Even the GTX KO SLI configuration shifts the bottleneck to the graphics cards starting as low as 1024x768 (or 800x600 with anti-aliasing). We benchmark without soft shadows, but enabling the soft shadows has a performance hit roughly equal to that of enabling 4xAA. The truly amazing thing about FEAR is that it's not even really playable without high-powered SLI graphics cards if you want to run anti-aliasing and a high resolution. If FEAR is your game, a system like the Monarch Hornet Pro Revenge will manage to run it properly. Hopefully, FEAR represents the worst case scenario for the next year or more, unless you're one of those who likes finding excuses to upgrade frequently.