GeForce GTX 1080 2-way SLI review - Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

So you missed all recent triple A game titles as well as DX12 titles eh ? Yep, us as well. SLI support does not seem to be fully enabled just yet with the current 368.25 WHQL driver. So the results on that we'll add in a later update. We also did not include any Crossfire results for comparison as I want to re-do the complete test on all games on these cards as well with the newest driver. So please look at this article as merely some preliminary results with SLI.

For the titles in this preliminary article that did work, scaling is pretty okay; but you need to be at least at 2560x1440 and preferably at Ultra HD as only there scaling makes sense. It's that old devil, CPU limitation again. Something that would have been nice to test with DX12 titles, if only they had worked. Ah well, .. we'll check it out later once a proper driver is available. 

Our recommendation, with a single monitor setup up-to say 1920x1080 to 2560x1440 you'd be more than okay with just one card, two if you want that extra boom-boom-pow (but the verdict is still out on that). Now, if you have that nice Ultra HD monitor with a 3840x2160 resolution, that's where a 2nd card could make a lot of sense. But A) I am seriously inclined to recommend 1070'ies price performance wise and B) I am still inclined to steer away from Multi-GPU SLI setups. I think you need to spend too much money for what you receive in return scaling wise. Processor power then. We use a X99 / Core i7 5960X Extreme processor clocked at 4400 MHz. With multi-GPU gaming these faster clocked 6-core puppies do show an increase in performance. You do need to wonder though if the 10~15% performance increase in lower resolutions really justifies that money, but obviously if you can afford two cards in SLI, you probably will go for the best and fastest infrastructure as well. That would be X99 with a nice 6 or 8 or more recent 10-core processor.

Noise & Heat

Depending on your configuration the temperature target protection of the reference GeForce GTX 1080 founders edition cards hover in the 80 to 85 Degrees C at maximum. As explained, in a poorly ventilated chassis this can have an adverse effect, since the temperature is the top priority the cards could clock down (throttle) a bit once they want to pass that 83 degrees C target, a feature to protect your 1080'ies. Mind you that all board partners offer 3rd party coolers available with all the AIB brands, there will be a lot better offers in cooling performance for the most of them! If you stick to founders edition cards, noise wise really, it's OK. Up-to two cards you can definitely hear airflow under full GPU stress though. And again, with board partner cards like the ones from Gigabyte, MSI, Palit, Galax and ASUS you will be surprised how silent such a SLI setup can be.

In closing

As stated many times, this is a preliminary article. I wanted to push some SLI results out, however the driver does not seem to be ready just yet. Hence I also forfeited on going deeper with Crossfire/SLi combo's etc. For not this article is merely a reference point with some initial results on game titles that are supported. I do know that with 1080 SLI you'll need to have a spicy PC with a fast clock processor if you'd stick to the somewhat lower solutions as we ran into CPU limitation pretty much everywhere. Really 1080 SLI only will make sens STARTING at 2560x1440, but preferably ultra HD as that's where the benefits start to show.

We'll update this article once a better driver is out offering proper SLI support and then will look and update with  Hitman (2016), Tomb Raider (2016), GTA5, Anno  2205, AOS. Doom, Witcher III, The Division and Total War WARHAMMER. But for now, as limited as the review is ..  you'll at least have an idea where 2-way SLi scaling is headed.

 - H

Other Related reviews

• MSI GeForce GTX 1080 GAMING X 8G review
• GeForce GTX 1080 Founders reference review
• GeForce GTX 1080 FCAT Frametime Analysis
• GeForce GTX 1080 Overclock guide
  
  
• GeForce GTX 1070 Founders reference review
• GeForce GTX 1070 FCAT Frametime Analysis

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