GeForce GTX 280 SLI Dual | Triple review test - 10 - 3-way SLI Game Performance

3-Way SLI

Two days before writing this article I was wondering. I have an overclocked edition card here, and also have two reference samples. The higher clocks on the OC version should prohibit 3-way SLI from working. But I also know that NVIDIA in certain situations downclocks the OCed card in the driver to get SLI going. So I gave it a try .. surprisingly it worked.

So what I'm doing here in this bonus 3-way SLI part is a little subjective. See I felt that our main graphics card test system with the 680i mainboard and Core to Extreme 6800 processor (2.9 GHz) would not do 3-way SLI any justice.

So my though was this, let me build the fastest system that I have ever built, and do the 3-way SLI results on there. At all costs I wanted to prevent the 3-Way SLI setup to be CPU bottlenecked. So I picked up the phone and called up Intel. 'Hey Guys, I need an Penryn based processor that can overclock massively'. Meep meep, roadrunner at the door .. (Coyote opens door) a nice engineering sample Core 2 Quad Extreme QX 9770 arrived at my doorstep. Then I took the memory and mainboard from our last nForce 790i SLI Ultra review. Now earlier last week we did a heatpipe CPU cooler shootout, remember? I took the best performing cooling from that test, the Tuniq Core Contact.

All components together formed the near perfect symbiosis for a nice overclocked system. Now at this point I was afraid how much money normally we already had to spend on this rig .. but hey, this isn't about money any longer ... this is the quest for the almighty e-peen.

Messy - oh yeah  ...

After spending a minute or five (did I mention already that I just love the nForce 790i overclocking capabilities?) I had the processor running pretty darn stable at 4200 MHz on all four cores. We now have brought Frankenstein to live, I call the PC "The Uberclock", I like to throw in some German phrases here and there.

Objectivity in this part - I mentioned it earlier, I kept the 3-way SLI results away from the first part of this article, as the results taken with this system quite honestly may not be compared with the Single and SLI results as mentioned in all charts.

So please understand this is for reference only .. just to show you what can be achieved. The Single & (2x) SLI results have been taken on our standard 680i - X6800 test setup. And the 3-way SLI results are done on "The Uberclock" system. I just wanted to make this very clear so there can be no misunderstanding.

You guys ready ? Let's go ...

First let me do something real funny to see.

Just to get you an idea how well 3-way SLI can scale. You are looking at two mid-range cards, GeForce 8600 GTS & the very popular GeForce 9600 GT versus 3-way SLI. All fun aside, let's have a peek at 3-way SLI scaling. Next page please.