[review]3-way SLI, a new gaming experience
Page 1: The cost of 3-way SLI
Page 2: 3-way SLI bridge
Page 3: 3-Way SLI platform settings and important remarks
Page 4: Test bed
Page 5: 3DMark06
Page 6: DX10:Lost Planet & DX9:FEAR
Page 7: DX10:Company of Heroes OF & Crysis
Page 8: DX10:Bioshock & UT3 Demo
Page 9: DX10:PTBoats & World in conflict & DX9:HL2:EP2
Page 10: Comparison
Page 11: 3-way SLI platform power consumption
Page 12: Final thoughts
The cost of 3-way SLI
There are only two versions of VGA card that supports 3-way SLI: The 8800GTX and 8800Ultra. What’s more, NVIDIA requires a platform like this to play with 3-way SLI:
* Intel Core 2 Quad
* NVIDIA nForce 680i/780i
* 2GB DDR2-800 (of course if you use a EPP memory that would be great)
* Windows Vista
And you can not use a 15 inch monitor while you using such a expensive platform. An 24inch LCD is minimum. So the total cost will be:
39,894RMB, about 5442USD and still not includes chassis, keyboard, mouse and DVDROM. And if you want to go more xtreme:
With the new 45nm 4 core QX9650, Striker II formula, Dell 3007 WFP, WD5000YS Raid, the platform now is about 8100 USD. Can you afford this?
December 27th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
“Donβt forget the Quad CrossfireX coming this January. Will AMD do better this time?”
Hehe, from a technical perspective, the reason why Nvidia chose to do a 3way SLI(not 4way or more) is that they wanted to have direct SLI connection between every video card. Using 2 SLI connectors, Nvidia’s solution utilizes the low latency of one hop connection. Compared to ATI’s quad crossfire, the data has to jump 3 hops from the top ATI video card all the way to the bottom card, which makes the latency 3 times as high, which will cause image synchronization issues, degrading performance.
Plus, Vista without SP1 currently only support 3 frames of forward rendering in AFR mode, thus putting the limit of SLI to 3 way. Now, SP1 will allow more GPUs, but ATI’s solution is limited to the release schedule of Vista SP1. We will see, it is getting interesting.
December 28th, 2007 at 5:45 am
FEAR is DX10?
December 28th, 2007 at 10:17 am
FEAR is DX9 game
December 28th, 2007 at 11:00 am
@Doug Friedman,
ya, 3 hops is not good, but you forgot the PCIe-2.0. ATI’s Quad CFX is based on PCIe-2.0. while 3-way SLI isn’t.the CFX connector itself is not as important as SLI connector.
but i really concern about the Catalyst..you know that is not a good driver
December 28th, 2007 at 11:06 am
Maybe I missed something, but I thought that 680i tri-sli is not as effective due to the middle slot being 8x not 16x and thus bringing the other 2 slots down as well.
December 28th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
yes 16+8+16 PCIe
December 29th, 2007 at 1:06 am
Nice review. A few edits needed though.
1. Title :
“[review]3-way SLI, a new gaming expreience”
Should be - “experience”
2. Page 3 :
“Important: switch between 2-way SLI and 3-way SLI is sample,”
Should be - “Important: To switch from 3-way SLI to 2-way SLI is simple,”
December 29th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Thank you LaGUNaMAN, i already fix the bugs..
December 29th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
You’re welcome jeff, rock on!