Power Consumption and Conclusions
Well we saw that the performance can scale pretty well with our 3-Way SLI system and so does the power use! You can see that the 1100 watt power supply requirement wasn’t just exaggerating as we saw several cases of over 800 watts usage during our testing. Our various battery backups in the office went crazy when we started pulling that much juice so we had to suck it up and plug straight into the wall. I live life dangerously!! Even at idle the 3-Way SLI system draws 419 watts – more than our system at load with a single 8800 Ultra card!
The short of it is: if you use a 3-Way system often, you will feel it on your monthly bill. Nice!
3-Way SLI Performance and Scaling
It would seem that I have been saying this pretty frequently about NVIDIA, but I am once again pleasantly surprised by the performance of this new product. Coming into my testing I was prepared to see some applications scale when adding a third card but I did not expecting as many different applications or as high a scaling percentages.
Looking for the most impressive titles we saw there are several. Company of Heroes, Call of Juarez and Lost Planet were all three games that saw scaling across the board and not just at insane resolutions. These games saw scaling in decent percentages at 1600×1200 or 1920×1200 or both, in addition to the more probably 2560×1600 performance gains. Pessimists might claims that because these were all DX10 titles that it shows some kind of inefficiencies in the programming but I don’t think that’s the case. The API is challenging in terms of software and hardware and the 3-Way SLI system looked very impressive in these cases.
Other games like Bioshock, Call of Duty 4 and Unreal Tournament 3 saw scaling, but only at the highest resolutions. If you have a 2560×1600 30” monitor then that is very good news for you as this 3-Way SLI system will give you playable frame rates at its native and impressive-as-hell resolution. Because of some CPU bottlenecks or the fact that the game engine doesn’t push the GPU quite as much as the games mentioned in the paragraph above, these games don’t see the scaling at lower resolutions which could be a negative for users without XHD screens.
The ultimate gaming platform?
Looking at performance in World in Conflict, this is a flub. The game is HEAVILY processor dependent and as such it makes sense that adding in one or two more 8800 Ultra cards was going to do little for performance.
Finally, we come to Crysis, my one true annoyance for this article. This is the one game that I was really looking forward to seeing run on the 3-Way system and it just didn’t turn out that impressive. In fact, moving to a third card did zero all the way up to negative improvements for performance in my real-world game play testing. NVIDIA’s claims of being able to play at 1920×1200 at “Very High” is more than questionable and I think they should rethink continuing to use the built-in flyby for anything more than comparisons. And since I was using the latest 1.1 patch candidate that Crytek has supplied to hardware vendors or reviewers, I don’t think any dramatic changes are going to be happening between now and its official release. A shame…
Platform Considerations
No doubt a big part of the 3-Way SLI story is the platform. You are going to need all the right components including a 680i/780i motherboard, three 8800 GTX or Ultra GPUs, a high end processor and of course that 1100+ watt power supply. What, you don’t have that sitting around?
If you don’t then you have two options: build it or buy it. Obviously everyone has their own views on that but it is nice to see that all of these components are actually available to the end user, minus that SLI bridge connector that should appear at Newegg and the likes very soon. The cost is going to be considerable, but we expected as much.
Why not other cards?
For this launch, this is only outstanding question I have. Why would NVIDIA not offer this technology to 8800 GT/GTS users? It obviously a decision they made a while ago since the 8800 GTX and Ultras have had dual SLI connections on them for quite some time and the new GT/GTS cards do not. I haven’t really gotten a straight “non-PR” answer out of anyone yet, but I’ll be on the look out.
Pricing and Availability
Let’s do the math real quick, according to our PC Perspective pricing engine:
1 x Intel E6850 – $277
1 x NV 680i SLI motherboard – $209
1 x 2GB DDR2 8500 Corsair memory – $150
3 x GeForce 8800 Ultra cards – $1887
1 x 3-Way SLI bridge card – $10
1 x 1000 watt Thermaltake PSU – $295
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Total (without case, hard drive, DVD, etc): $2828
That is the basic component cost for a great 3-Way SLI system. If you go with GTX cards rather than Ultra cards, you can knock another $462 off the price as you can pick those up for about $475 each now. Either way you are talking $1500-2000 in just GPU costs and that eats up a lot of allowance. If you went with the QX9650 processor that our Digital Storm computer came with, you’d be asking for a $1000 CPU instead of a $277 one and bumping up to 4GB of DDR2 memory make sense in this build too so add in some more money there. Accessorize with cases and hard drives as needed, and voila, a nice down payment on a house, err, I mean gaming system!
In all seriousness though, NVIDIA knows this kind of setup is going to appeal to a mass audience and they don’t expect a big crowd to line up for 3-Way systems just yet. Gamers with a little bit more cash than most though can pony up though and get the ultimate gaming rig available on the market.
Final Thoughts
NVIDIA has just taken its performance lead in the world of high-end consumer graphics and trumped it by introducing 3-Way SLI to the world. Though we have some minor issues with what cards NVIDIA has setup for 3-Way SLI compatibility the fact is that the performance results from our testing are freaking incredible. There are definitely some major games that need to be addressed in future, Crysis being the most prominent, but our initial impressions proved quite pleasing. If you want the absolute fastest PC gaming platform, NVIDIA’s 3-Way SLI is your ticket to speed. Just be prepared to open that change purse a little further.
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hi i would just like to
hi i would just like to clarify that a 3-way SLI supported GPU is better that just a SLI supported GPU. Please email me the answer