Final Words & Conclusion
Final words & conclusion
Before we head into the conclusion there are several parties we need to thank for making this article possible. Two big thumbs up to eVGA for making one heck of a motherboard and shipping one out to us just for the sake of this article. Massive thanks go out to Point of View and Zotac for providing the boards needed for this test, you guys rock! Oh and guys -- your boards are well burnt in and classified as very stable :) Last but not least Intel for helping us out with the processor.
Okay chaps, conclusion time. Quad SLI obviously makes no sense whatsoever. Heck it's even ridiculous if you'd opt it. Quad SLI at this time is not even supported in games, just 3DMark Vantage has official support. NVIDIA specifically released a driver just to do this, for the overclocking crowd. And guess what; I'm not pointing fingers at all as NVIDIA has been straightforward about this. It sucks though as I definitely would have liked to see some Quad GPU game scaling with this setup.
So we knew from the very beginning this would be nothing more than a prestige project. You can hate it, like it, love it ... but the two days I spend on this project, once it was up and running, have been the best days spend in a long time. It just is so much fun, the feeling of competition, achieving new goals, squeezing every last drop of performance out of the hardware, see how far you can kick the hardware, really it all is the incentive that seems to have been lacking in a dull hardware industry for the past year.
The experience is grand, the feeling wonderful. Obviously the sheer amount of cash needed to accomplish something like this is something else though. So yeah we liked this experiment very much.
Though wayhaaay too loud, the four GTX 480 cards behaved really well after they received some proper airflow. Very impressive is also the eVGA X58 4-way SLI Classified motherboard. Except a needed BIOS update there literally has not been any hiccup with that platform. It was designed from ground up to be a significant player in the extreme enthusiast segment. I already hate the fact that I could not use my VapoChill unit Phase Change cooling unit as Asetek does not make LGA1366 mounts. Otherwise we could have set the stakes even higher.
Anyway, time wrap it up. We had a great, no just plain fantastic time fooling around with this setup and are not about to even discuss the setbacks, cash needed, and all the other factors haunting the GeForce GTX 480 series. This was a prestige enthusiast project with one goal only, to reach and breach my personal 3DMark Vantage score and when I achieved 42967 points I actually shouted out a really gay'ish sounding scream of happiness. Now I'm just wondering how long it will take before we will shatter the record with future GPUs :)
Thanks go out to (in alphabetical order):
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Hilbert signing off ...
ATH +++
