GeForce GTX 680 3-way SLI review - Introduction

Point of View GeForce GTX 680 3-way SLI

Last week we checked out the GeForce GTX 680 reference review and 2-way SLI. In this article we'll up it one notch higher, 3-way SLI.

We'll be looking at 3-way SLI from a single monitor point of view, so ideally 1920x1200 or 2560x1440/1600 is the monitor you have to be able to compare to what 3-way SLI would do for you on your setup.

We have seen great performance increases with 2-way SLI, but on a single monitor will 3-way SLI scale just as well? -- we don't think so. So that's what we'll be looking for as an answer in today's article.

Next to that, over the past year or two we have been using a Nehalem architecture Core i7 960X processor at 3.8 GHz for our test platform. Though that is perfectly fine for 2-way SLI, with 3-way SLI you are bound to run into some CPU slowdowns here and there in some titles. So we'll also be comparing that setup with the new Core i7 3960X Sandy Bridge-E processor to finally see how much difference that hexacore processor makes. To spice things up we don't want the default clock frequency to be a limiting factor either, so that setup will be overclocked to 4600 MHz to put a little jelly on top of it all.

So today we'll put that to the test with NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 680, we place a reference GTX 680 graphics card alongside two GeForce GTX 680 cards from Point of View, all reference clocked.

Over the next few pages we'll tell you a bit about multi-GPU gaming, the challenges, the requirements and of course there'll be a nice tasty benchmark session. We'll have a peek at temperatures and power consumption of the GeForce GTX 680 cards in 3x SLI mode to monitor its generated performance and look at its handicaps.

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