GeForce GTX 295 Quad SLI gaming test - Introduction

Aaaah, don't you love the smell of napalm in the morning? Um ... yeah high-end stuff really makes my mind twisted. But really, once you have been playing around with an über high-end system with quad GPUs that was actually working pretty well, these weird one-liners come to mind.

Hello everybody and welcome to yet another graphics card review. 

You have probably just read the GeForce GTX 295 review. A dual-GPU based solution that kicks ass pretty intensely. Obviously you've read about the fact that these cards can be placed in SLI mode. Meaning you place two of these monsters in your pc, hook em up, strap 'em up and get even more game rendering performance.

Now surely, that's a horrendously expensive thing to do, it's insane and quite honestly a little silly. But heck, we have two of these cards in-house and an all new super clocked Core i7 test-platform to feed it the computational power it needs. Suffice to say, we'll be looking at GeForce GTX 295 in Quad SLI mode. But we need to make it a little more interesting, right?

Since the lab over here is pretty much a toy store for grown ups, we obviously also wanted to include some of the competition. Therefore we snagged two of those Radeon HD 4870 X2 beasts and put them in CrossfireX (quad GPU) mode as well. All in all very exciting and expensive gear. But heck this is Guru3D, we live and thrive for this stuff.

What we'll do today is what we always do. I'll guide you through what you need to think about when you are buying Quad SLI or CrossfireX components, then I'll tell you a little tale about the installation, followed by a couple tests we ran in that all mighty experience of high a resolution gaming rig. We'll top it all off with that conclusion we for some weird reason always call .. "the Verdict".

But first off for those that do not know; what is multi-gpu rendering and, particularly, Quad SLI? Meet today's contesters, by the way: