NVIDIA 3-Way SLI Previewed

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
From our front-page news:
If you believe that the best things come in pairs, you might be a little misguided. AMD is no longer the only ones with a "tri" product on the horizon - NVIDIA has finally unveiled their triple-SLI setup. Rather, the "3-Way SLI" setup. In case you are confused, no, you are not misunderstanding things.

HotHardware takes a look at the new setup, using three 8800 Ultras, and found that for this to be of benefit to anyone, you need to be using at least 1920x1200 as a resolution, preferably 2560x1600. The performance increases are there, but whether or not it warrants the insane cost of the GPUs... that's up to you.

The performance is undeniably drool-worthy, but what's not is the insane power consumption. At idle, their system sucked up a massive 473W. That's more than my QX6850/8800GTX setup at full load. If there is a need for finally purchasing a 1KW PSU... this might be it.

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However, you'll also need significant financial resources to bring a system build of this sort together. With even the least expensive GeForce 8800 Ultra on the market running at around $659 and the lowest cost GeForce 8800 GTX at $510, you're looking at $1500 - $2000 in graphics cards alone. Then there are power consumption, heat output and possibly noise considerations to keep in mind with an over-the-top ultra-high-end gaming machine like this.

Source: HotHardware
 

Merlin

The Tech Wizard
And look at the 3DMark results......only fractions of an increase.
They are going to thave to do something better than this setup.
Only in the shader at high resolutions is there any increase.
Let's see, spend 2K for three or 1.2 K for two...hmmmmmm
Well, I have the PSU for it, but I'll pass for now.
There has to be something better than this idea

Merlin
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
The reason there was zero increase in the 3D Mark tests is because it was run at 1280x1024. That's why there is a huge increase with the shader tests... it was run at 2560x1600.
 
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