GeForce GTX 480 4-way SLI review - Moving forward with 4-Way SLI

Moving forward with 4-Way SLI

So with thousands of EUROS worth of components in our hands, we at the very least had to verify that story that eVGA just told us about, and good gosh golly they where right; 4-way SLI is not supported on the Rampage III Extreme.

We verified with Windows 7 64-bit and the dedicated GTX 480 Quad SLI driver (197.55) and also with 197.75 WHQL.

What happens is that with four cards installed the driver will only assign two cards for SLI and this will setup 2-way SLI despite having four cards installed. Four way SLI will simply not kick in with the R3E as it needs two NF200 chips. When the GeForce driver sees the NF200 ICs, quad-SLI all of the sudden becomes available.

So right there our dream to shatter the 3DMark Vantage score was blown into bits and pieces.

Now tally up with me:

• 375 EUR - ASUS Rampage III Extreme Motherboard
• 450 EUR - OCZ Blade memory 2133 MHz CAS9
• 900 EUR - Core i7 980 Extreme
• 2000 EUR - 4x GeForce GTX 480
• 400 EUR - 2x 1200 W PSUs
• 300 EUR - Liquid Cooling System
• 300 EUR - Solid State Drive

So in theory we blew roughly 5000 EUR worth of components, the best of the best and the motherboard stopped everything to a grinding halt.

We then got back in contact with eVGA and they send out a proper 4-way SLI X58 out our way. This board is made for quad-SLI as it has the NF200 ICs needed to enable quad SLI, and next to that it has been designed for maximum overclocking.

The NF200 IC by the way is nothing more than a briddge/switch chip increasing PCIe lanes in-between the graphics cards for maximum data comminication. With the ASUS Rampage III Extreme now being replaced with the eVGA X58 Classified 4-way SLI motherboard we slowly but steadily got back on track with this somewhat silly yet enthusiast article.

On the next page we'll briefly look at the motherboard, then we'll take you through the paces of what is needed. We'll overclock the processor. Then add quad-SLI, then apply a multi-GPU overclock ... and we finally end at 3DMark Vantage in the hope that we can break the target of 35.000 points (P score), that I had set personally.

Our first setup with the Rampage III Extreme motherboard - a no-go for Quad SLI