NVIDIA Quad SLI review

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Quad SLI
As most of you know both ATI and NVIDIA have solution on the market called Crossfire and SLI. Basically this will allow you to play your games with the help of multiple graphics processors (GPUs). Within the confines of compatible mainboards you can increase the overall rendering performance of your games and thus increase your graphical gaming experience in several ways. Simply stated, you can run two or more "graphics cards" on selected mainboards, or one (or more) graphics card(s) with multiple graphics cores on it.

By utilizing more of them whether that is two or more GPU's on a videocard or two graphics cards in one system is what we call Multi-GPU processing of games. And that was our focus, to simply look at the most competitive multi-GPU solution available on today's market and to see how it  performs and functions.

Quad SLI obviously simply means that there are four graphics chips being utilized for your gaming experience. If your mainboard could support it (Gigabyte Quad Royale), you could install 4 graphics cards and interconnect them. But NVIDIA recently released the GeForce 7950 GX2 videocard. A single graphics card with two GPUs per card, it also allows itself to be interconnected with what we call a SLI connector. If you want to try out quad core gaming effectively this is the most practical solution for you to try out at this moment in time.

But then there are other components ...

We are talking about uber-uber gaming here today. There might be an audience of like 0.001% out there actually buying this as your system has to be right in many ways and I'm not talking about the stack load of money you actually need to make all this happen. Let me give you the more important pointers here:

Here's what you also need to think about when building a Quad SLI rig component's wise and also why. Here are the Hilbert pointers:

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Graphics cards Simple .. you need two 550 USD GeForce 7950 GX2 videocards
Monitor Don't even think about Quad SLI gaming unless you can do a resolution above 2048x1536. The Dell & Apple 30"monitors are highly recommended here. Price ~2300 USD
Mainboard You need a high-end SLI ready mainboard with two PCI-Express graphics connectors, 16x PCI-E lanes per graphics card! In short, go for a NVIDIA nForce 570 or 590 mainboard at 150-200 USD.
Processor You need the best as your CPU is a symbiosis with your graphics solution. You need a dual-core CPU starting at AMD64 Athlon FX-60 or even better, the newly released Intel Core 2 Duo processors (Conroe core) kick ass. Even the cheap 320 USD E6600 will wipe the floor with an FX-62. So Intel Conroe is highly recommended! You do not want your four graphics cores to be held back by your CPU.
Memory Good gaming requires good memory. Whatever you choose, get yourself low-latency memory DDR/DDR2 memory, minimal 1 GB in dual-channel. With the future in mind, now might be a good time to move to 2 GB, low-latency is expensive though and 2GB might set you back 300 USD.
Power Supply Especially for this review we did another article. Quad SLI gaming, dual-core technology, this all requires a hefty toll on power consumption. You need a PSU with multiple 12 volts rails and decent Ampage.  In total over all 12 volts rails you should have 50 AMPs available on your PSU. We recommend the Enermax Galaxy series (review here) as we have tested it with today's setup yet it's priced at 350 USD.
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Keep that in mind. And also sum it up for a second, that's right, you need a budget of 2000-2500 USD and that's excluding the monitor. That's still two to three times cheaper than a pre-built Quad SLI system from Alienware though ! However, there's one more item I'd like to address. All these components are high-end and thus performing at top-level. Especially four GPU's in one system will be an issue when it comes to heat. The videocards will dump huge amounts of heat into your PC. So PLEASE get yourself a high-end casing in the likings of Lian-Li and make darn sure it's well ventilated.

NVIDIA Quad SLI reviewed

To your left the 30" Dell screen @ 2560x1600 we'll be using today. To your right my two work monitors (and it almost looks small) the 24" Dell Screens @ 1920x1200.

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