GeForce GTX 560 SLI tested - Introduction

GeForce GTX 560 SLI gets tested

Greetings and salutations to ya'll  -- before we start, we recommend you to read the standard  GTX 560 reviews first so you know a little better what products we use in this extra Guru3D.com review.

Ever since the GeForce GTX 400/500 series we have seen some impressive increases in performance scaling when it comes to multi-GPU setups, in NVIDIA's case we obviously are talking about SLI performance. In the most high-end segment we more often notice some CPU limitation (processor bottleneck) here and there. That means with current generation processors (Sandy Bridge with GTX 580 3-way SLI for example), your GPUs might want to go a little faster, but the CPU is holding them back!

Now it might make more sense to get two products in SLI that are price wise more interesting while in theory the SLI performance should remain optimal, especially monitor resolutions of 1920x1080 and below. Things get more interesting when you combine two cards that offer nice performance at an affordable price, we think that the GeForce GTX 560 might be a perfect match for SLI in combination with current generation processors.

So let's simply put that to the test, we place a ECS (reference) GTX 560 graphics card alongside an Palit GTX 560 Sonic, yes that is possible these days. We mix two vendors, but do clock both cards at reference clock frequencies to keep things objective and see how well SLI performance behaves.

So if your wallet allows it, you can double up that shader count and thus performance with the help of NVIDIA's SLI technology for say 300 to 350 EUR. Multi-GPU gaming surely has grown to become more popular over the past few year thanks mostly to NVIDIA's SLI solutions initially, and obviously later on AMD's ATI CrossfireX joined that path as well.

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. We'll have a peek at temperatures, power consumption and overclocking of the GeForce GTX 560 cards in SLI mode to squeeze out every last ounce of performance.

Have a peek at the products being slammed and spanked today, and then let's startup this article.