GeForce GTX 480 3-way SLI review - Introduction

GeForce GTX 480 3-way SLI with a sharp Point of View

You know, typically after spring, closing in on summer, time things start to slow down on the hardware scene. And good gawd my man, it's still busier than ever. Each and every month there are new NDA releases.. there's just lots of good new gear out there and that's just excellent! Now I still had a GeForce GTX 480 SLI article planned (and GTX 470 SLI as well actually) but as a result of how busy it has been and still is, and on top of that finding out that the NVIDIA board partners would rather see their boards selling in the stores insteaad of being tortured by the press, this SLI article got delayed.

None the less, have no fear .. ze Guru is here! Today we'll start up the first in a series of SLI articles based on the GeForce GTX 480 series graphics cards. GeForce GTX 400 series might have had a rough start but if we filter out the mighty thorn of this release, the noise levels, then for a minute everybody can wholeheartedly admit that they are beautiful performing graphics cards. Back in January I already heard that SLI performance would be outstanding with this new series and well, that definitely tickled my senses and taste buds.

As a results today we'll 'finally' have a look at SLI scaling of that GeForce GTX 480. We look at single card performance, dual-card performance and also triple (3-way) SLI performance to see how well these puppies will scale.

The article will first cover SLI performance among the new GTX 480's in several configurations and games, and then we'll check a little 2-way Multi-GPU gaming in a handsome multi-GPU slaughter-fest article in the ATI versus NVIDIA kind of way to see who and what scales the best.

Over the next few pages we'll tell you a bit about multi-GPU gaming, the challenges, the requirements and of course a nice tasty benchmark session. Have a browse to the next page please, where we'll startup like lightning and thunder --- jeehaw !