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A Twin IntroductionSeries: GV-3D1
More info: Gigabyte
MSRP: 499 EUR / 599 USD (Including GA-K8NXP-SLI mainboard valued at 175 USD)

Seek the best price here.

Somewhere in December I received a press-release from Gigabyte. First glimpse of the press-release: 3D1. That reminded me somehow of a song, which title I just can't seem to remember. Then the first look at the image, oh crap, there are actually two graphics cores on that thing, finally someone did it! Yay!

NVIDIA's SLI is a hit though, when I talk to friends (gamers) they all know, heard and talk about it. In fact most of them are thinking about buying a SLI based combination, which I find  very interesting to hear because I did not expect to see this technology hit mainstream.

But ehm let's take it a step further with the 3D1. How about two of these dual-gpu cards in SLI, huh? Aah, no sorry. That is just not possible. This my friends is a dual 6600GT card built with 256MB DDR III memory. The 3D1's two processors communicate through NVIDIA's SLI interface and achieves over 14,000 points in 3DMark2003, according to our tests. That my friends is even more then the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition and NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Ultra.

As should be clear by now, the card has two 6600 GT chips on it and has a 590 MHz (2x) memory frequency and a 500 MHz core on both GPU's. You can say at the least that I'm excited about innovation like this.

Well now, to be able to test it we finally jumped the SLI wagon. To make a nice assessment on this lovely SLI madness we equipped ourselves with a Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI mainboard and an Athlon 64 4000+ processor. We had to opt for this nForce4 SLI mainboard as the 3D1 card unfortunately only works on this particular mainboard (in SLI mode that is). In fact, you can only buy this card in combo with the mainboard. It's an awesome combo though, priced at sub 500 USD.

Of course we are going to review the mainboard also, but this review will purely focus on the performance of the graphics card.