Published in Graphics

Three-way SLI tested by German site

by on13 December 2007
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Has some real-world advantages

Three-way SLI has finally been tested and it has been done so by PC Games Hardware in Germany. The test system used only had the 680i chipset, and the CPU was an overclocked Core 2 Quad overclocked to 3GHz, as well as 2GB of DDR2 memory and Vista 32-bit.

The graphcis cards were three XFX 8800 Ultras and the driver used was the Forceware 169.18. The test suite consisted of Crysis, UT3, Fear and Company of Heroes.

As you'll see from the graphs, there are some real-world advantages by going for that third card, that is if you have a 2,560x1,600 display or you are a die hard fan of Crysis at a very high quality setting.

Crysis was the only game run at a lower resolution, namely 1,920x1,200, and the average frame rate was not impressive at all, going from 27.1FPS with two cards to 37.9FPS with three cards. In FEAR we're looking at 90FPS for two cards, compared to 128FPS for three cards, which is a much more impressive result, especially as this is at a higher resolution.

Moving on to UT3,  the performance increase wasn't as impressive here, going from 122,7 to 144,7FPS.  In CoH you're looking at going from 45.2FPS to 62FPS; again, not that impressive.

This doesn't really tell us anything new, as we expected three-way SLI to be faster than two cards, and it is.

You can find the full test here in German
Last modified on 14 December 2007
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