Gaming

The 750a doesn't get much opportunity to stretch its legs through our first wave of game tests. No more than a few frames per second separate the fastest system from the slowest across four recent titles.

SLI performance
We were curious to see whether the nForce 750a's dual-x8 SLI implementation could keep up with the dual-x16 goodness available in the 780a, so we hooked up a pair of GeForce 9800 GTX graphics cards in SLI for a little additional testing on the nForce boards. For these tests, we cranked all in-game detail levels and ran with 4X antialiasing and 16X aniso (with the exception of Crysis, of course). We also updated our graphics drivers to the latest ForceWare 175.19 release and pushed the display resolution as high as our monitor would accommodate in each game.

Across the board, the nForce 750a delivers slightly lower framerates than its nForce sibling. That's a pretty good result considering that the 750a is effectively working with half the graphics slot bandwidth. Today's games don't seem to mind being restricted to a dual-x8 SLI configuration, at least when those lanes are second-generation PCI Express.