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)

[phelan1777]

Wow talka bout NO airflow...........other then stock...................ugh the nightmare for water cooling...............

Not to mention juice needed..............

[grimREEFER]

o , that is fast

[Scimitar]

Holy crap! Crysis nearly playable at 1920 X 1200 Very High with some AA and AF. That is a lot of money to spend though for a rig that will be outclassed soon by a Geforce 9 series configuration.

[zakelwe]

12fps per card ! Smokin' !

Maybe it is better to wait for SLi D9E ?

Regards

Andy

[dduckquack]

looks like a bigmac burger. and yea, cooling is gonna be a problem, maybe a dedicated 3-way SLI cooler with heatpipes coming out of the three vcards

[hausner]

Crysis its a big joke, Triple SLI with 8800U and only max 37,9 fps

[xlink]

Crysis its a big joke, Triple SLI with 8800U and only max 37,9 fps

that's an average, not a max

[HKPolice]

Stupid review, Multi-GPU performance in Vista is a joke, should've benched in XP.

[Pudi]

1800$ of graphics cards, yeah now we can play crysis in mid 30's max

[Simps]

Talk to me about no PCI slot left...
What about our creative X-FI Fatal1ty stuff?

[]'s
Simps

[Fr3ak]

Stupid review, Multi-GPU performance in Vista is a joke, should've benched in XP.

Triple-SLI only works with Vista, my friend

Nvidia provided the test-PC, so installing a different OS was out of the question anyway

[naokaji]

creative still exists? their drivers are so terrible you dont want to have their products anyway

well the board thats in that system has the worst possible spacing between the pci-e slots, some boards with different layouts might leave enough room for a non gpu card. or, time to watercool... full cover single slot wc blocks ftw

[[XC] gomeler]

Well.. on the bright side atleast it seems to scale decently from 1, 2, and 3 cards. Time to make some slim LN2 pots me thinks

[Fr3ak]

Keep in mind that the resolution of the tested games are very high with everything turned on that possibly exists, so using the 3D Mark with a low resolution (and Vista) might not scale very good. I will test the benefit for 3D Marks as soon as possible, but I think we will see some numbers by K|ngp|n soon anyway

[Gunslinger]

Details "very high" should be 2560X1600 not 1920X1200. And yet it still struggles, and only works in Vista, must say I'm very disappointed in the low FPS. Yet I don't care for Crysis anyway, so I guess I would like to see some average FPS at 2560X1600 in COD4 or something similar.

[Solarfall]

now that looks quite mad the power consumption is gonna be freaking huge

[DeathReborn]

Cooling.... I agree with the custom TriSLi cooler or water/LN2 because those top 2 cards are gonna be toast before long. Now they just need to release a G92 GTS/X based card with TriSLi support...

Stupid review, Multi-GPU performance in Vista is a joke, should've benched in XP.

Considering it's a full DX10 (not modded files DX9) bench in Crysis they used the right OS.

[pumbertot]

Details "very high" should be 2560X1600 not 1920X1200. And yet it still struggles, and only works in Vista, must say I'm very disappointed in the low FPS. Yet I don't care for Crysis anyway, so I guess I would like to see some average FPS at 2560X1600 in COD4 or something similar.

i think you are getting mixed up here as the details settings have nothing at all to do with the resolution but i get your point.i would think the trSLI will scale even better on higher res so prob 9/18/30fps for single/SLI/triSLI respectively.
as for it still struggles what do you expect from the likes of Crysis? that is good scaling whatever way you look at it regardless of the still not great fps.

[SKYMTL]

Last I checked there was no 1X AA and 1X AF setting in Crysis.

But in all reality while it looks great with 8800 Ultra cards....those cards are in the process of being phased out. Also, the few cards that would be perfect for this application (8800GT / 8800GTS 512MB) are not compatible with Tri-SLI.

IMO, if Nvidia wants to sell this technology then they need to make sub-$400 cards compatible with it like ATI does with their Quadfire.

[Fatal Error]

Εxactly at this moment is tottally pointless,i'll laugh with those that gonna pay 1800$ to get triple sli

[flopper]

IMO, if Nvidia wants to sell this technology then they need to make sub-$400 cards compatible with it like ATI does with their Quadfire.

agree.

the cost is just with todays generation not the one I would go for.

[Fr3ak]

Last I checked there was no 1X AA and 1X AF setting in Crysis.

1x AA and 1x AF means "no AA, no AF". That is the technical right term if no AA/AF is being used. 0xAA/AF would mean a black screen...

At the end of the picture galerie are graphs of the 3 other games being tested. In UT3 the difference between dual- and triple-SLI is not really that great :/

[saaya]

i wonder how many people will run tripple sli.
the price performance ratio is insane... and then you need 680 on top of that... *shudders*

[lazy]

those cards will not last being in that setup...

1800 for tri sli, then you need min 1100Watt psu, then you need some other way of cooling.. all for something thats gonna be worthless in 2-3months..