PCGH: Triple-SLI benchmarked!

[Fr3ak]

The German print and online magazine PC Games Hardware had the opportunity to bench Nvidia's tripple-SLI. The benchmarks have been done using Crysis and some other games. Unfortunately a unreleased Crysis build with number 5837 was used which seems to be optimized for triple-SLI. This new patch will be publicy available in a couple days.

So far only te 8800 GTX and 8800 Ultra are capable of running triple-SLI. What else is needed to run triple-SLI?

- 3 Geforce 8800 GTX or Ultra cards
- a 3-way-SLI_Connectorboard (or as a alternative: 2 very short and 1 very long SLI-bridge)
- a mainboard with 3 PCI-E-x16-slots (680i or the upcoming 7x0i)
- the right Forceware driver (in this case 169.18 was used)
- a PSU that is strong enough to provide enough juice =)

Nvidia recommends using at least a 1,100W PSU. The Thermaltake Topower that was used in the test was really stressed. The kill-a-watt-device showed a total power consumption of 819W.

The benchmarks were done with a system that Nvidia provided. It's specs are:

CPU: Core 2 Quad Q6850 @ 3000 MHz (333x9)
Board: Asus P5N32-E SLI with Nforce 680i-Chipsatz
RAM: 2x1,024 MiByte Corsair Dominator
OS: Vista 32 Bit (Enterprise Edition)

As tests were used:
Tests:
• Crysis Build 3857, PCGH-Ice-Benchmark
• Unreal Tournament 3, PCGH-vCTF-Suspense-Benchmark
• Fear v1.08, int. performance-test
• Company of Heroes, int. performance-test

VGA: 3x XFX Geforce 8800 Ultra (612/1,512/1,080 MHz)
Driver: Forceware 169.18

The pictures speak for themselves =)

Link to the (German) article: http://www.pcgameshardware.de/?article_id=624620

Link to the picture-galerie: http://www.pcgameshardware.de/?menu=...mage_id=747468

(Click into the picture to enlarge it, "nächstes Bild" means next picture)