Gigabyte WaterForce 3 Way SLI Review: A Force to Reckoned With
Benchmarks and Overclocking
[sc:graphic_card_testing ]Synthetic Benchmarks
3DMark Firestrike from Futuremark is a Semi-synthetic DirectX11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. Firestrike performs advanced geometry, illumination and particle tests with its Graphics benchmark and performs physics simulations using the CPU. For our video card test, only the graphical score is taken.
Unigine Valley 1.0 and Heaven 4.0 are GPU intensive synthetic benchmarks that utilize tessellation, advanced lighting, dynamic environments and other DirectX11 graphical features. Both of these are excellent for video card stability and temperature testing and even supports Stereo3D and multi-monitor benchmarking.
Tomb Raider is a re-launch title of the decades old video game series utilizing a DirectX 11 Crystal Engine to render a 3rd-person action adventure game. It has a built-in benchmark used for cross-video card comparison.
Bioshock Infinite is the third title in the alternate-universe first-person shooter franchise utilizing Unreal Engine 3. The built-in benchmark was used for video card comparison.
In-Game Benchmarking of the Gigabyte WaterForce 3 way SLI
Overclocked Performance
During our overclock testing the readily available Gigabyte OC Guru was used to achieve the performance we got. This tool can be downloaded from the Gigabyte site from this location: Gigabyte OC Guru Download
After doing the basic slight over clocking of the video cards it was time to push this setup to see what it could do. I upped the settings to what you see below and I was able to get some great overclocks in 3DMark Fire Strike benchmarks.
Starting off with Fire Strike Extreme I was able to produce a very nice overclock.
Which produced a ranking on the 3DMark Hall of Fame at the 79th spots (at the time of testing).
Next on the hit list was to see how well I could get the Gigabyte Water Force to perform at the Ultra setting. Again I was able to push it…a lot.
This time I was able to once again get on the Hall of Fame. This time I was able to hit the 21st position (at the time of testing)!
