GeForce GTX 570 SLI review - Introduction

GeForce GTX 570 SLI gets tested

When we wrote our GeForce GTX 580 SLI (2-way) article, we where flabbergasted by the great performance scaling, yet we did notice some CPU limitation (processor bottleneck) here and there. That means with current generation processors, your GPUs might want to go a little faster, but the CPU is holding them back.

As such 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 close to each other, especially monitor resolutions of 1920x1080 and below.

So the fine people from Gigabyte sent a 2^nd card prior to the release of the GeForce GTX 570, and that product, my friends, is really interesting in 2-way SLI as this article is going to show you. We see tremendous scaling and while 349 EUR per card is not exactly pocket change money, for roughly 700 EUR you can create a fragtastic monster PC with two GeForce GTX 570 cards.

So if your wallet allows it, you can double up that shader count and thus performance with the help of NVIDIA's SLI technology. 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 ATI CrossfireX joined that path as well. So today we take two GeForce GTX 570 cards and place them into 2-way SLI mode, courtesy of Gigabyte technology. We'll throw in a combo Radeon cards setup in CrossfireX, both platforms armed with the very latest drivers, patches and games.

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 of the GeForce GTX 570 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.