Pcie Expansion Performance With The Eb7-X8G2-Ras; High Performance Video Card Expansion Solutions - Magma EB7-X8G2 User Manual

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PCIe Expansion Performance with the EB7-X8G2-RAS

In the following section we will take a look at possible PCI Express expansion solutions using Magma's EB7 chassis.

High Performance Video Card expansion solutions

Magma's EB7-X8G2-RAS chassis can be used to add a high end PCI express video card to a system, be it a server, a PC
or a laptop that were not equipped with such a device for various reasons: cost, lack of physical space, heat dissipation
considerations, etc.
A question then arises as to how good of a performance can we obtain by utilizing
the expanded PCIe bus and high end video card vs. the built in video solution. For
that we turn to Futuremark's 3DMark® benchmarking software which has quickly
become the de-facto standard in Video card performance testing and evaluation.
The 3DMark® suite is optimized to work under Windows XP/Vista/Win7 and supports
the latest DirectX and derivative 3D multimedia technologies.
In this environment, a Gigabyte X58-UD5 was tested with various external PCIe
video cards connected to Slot #1 (PCIe x8G2) of the EB7-X8G2-RAS.
The motherboard has a Geforce 7600GS graphic card which is used an secondary
monitor. We first established a baseline by installing a high performance x16 Gen1
PCIe card into the EB7-X8G2-RAS: The Nvidia 8800 Ultra.
* These tests measured the net GPU performance, not including the CPU
The comparison table above shows an average 54% performance improvement between the baseline and the highest-
end video card tested. In other words, by expanding the PCI Express bus, the EB7-X8G2-RAS system was able to facilitate
an ever-improving benchmark result limited only by the 3 party card's performance and the bandwidth limitations of
rd
the bus itself.
For more details on the actual test methodology and an explanation of the benchmark figures please refer to:
www.futuremark.com
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