NVIDIA 3-Way SLI Previewed

If you believe that the best things come in pairs, you might be a little misguided. AMD is no longer the only ones with a “tri” product on the horizon – NVIDIA has finally unveiled their triple-SLI setup. Rather, the “3-Way SLI” setup. In case you are confused, no, you are not misunderstanding things.

HotHardware takes a look at the new setup, using three 8800 Ultras, and found that for this to be of benefit to anyone, you need to be using at least 1920×1200 as a resolution, preferably 2560×1600. The performance increases are there, but whether or not it warrants the insane cost of the GPUs… that’s up to you.

The performance is undeniably drool-worthy, but what’s not is the insane power consumption. At idle, their system sucked up a massive 473W. That’s more than my QX6850/8800GTX setup at full load. If there is a need for finally purchasing a 1KW PSU… this might be it.

However, you’ll also need significant financial resources to bring a system build of this sort together. With even the least expensive GeForce 8800 Ultra on the market running at around $659 and the lowest cost GeForce 8800 GTX at $510, you’re looking at $1500 – $2000 in graphics cards alone. Then there are power consumption, heat output and possibly noise considerations to keep in mind with an over-the-top ultra-high-end gaming machine like this

Source: HotHardware