The SLI overhead means that there is an additional 1% CPU load when playing WMV9 HD video streams back with two cards in SLI mode. The board also delivers comparable CPU load to the DFI nF4 SLI-DR and VIA K8T900 reference board too, when using a GeForce 7800 GT.
Again, we saw a slight overhead when using SLI mode - the two GeForce 6600 DDR2's were one second slower than the two single card tests we ran.
Interestingly, we found that the 6600 DDR2 SLI was faster when video encoding. There was a mere 5 seconds - over the course of a 30 minute test - difference between a single 6600 DDR2 and two in SLI.
The additional memory bandwidth and CPU power available on our high-end comparison system shows up in multitasking. On the EP-8NPA SLI, the overhead on 6600 DDR2 SLI meant that it took one second longer to encode the album with two cards installed. The improved video processor on the 7800 GT appears to have had something to do with the ten second decrease in encoding time.
The overhead for SLI had an effect on this test too - we found that our two single card configurations were around 5% faster than the two 6600 DDR2's in SLI mode.
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