QUAD SLI w/ Benchmarks!

by Sean Pelletier — Thursday, December 15, 2005, 08:49 AM EDT

The folks at Toms Hardware have taken two new Asus Extreme GeForce 7800GT graphics cards (each cards features dual-GPU's) and installed them into an SLI system for an effective Quad-GPU configuration! Despite a complete and total lack of support for a quad-gpu setup from both ASUS and NVIDIA, the gang managed to get the system up and running through a handful of benchmarks. WIthout question, the numbers in the article are impressive. However, it's tough deciding which numbers are more impressive. The benchmark results are high, but those power consumption numbers are nothing short of insane!

With this sneak preview, Tom's Hardware merely attempted to demonstrate that a Quad-GPU configuration works. There is no official release by NVIDIA and no support either yet. As the tests showed, this setup does not run smoothly with all of our games using the 77.77 driver. All the same, the cards show very impressive performance improvements in some of the benchmarks. Neither NVIDIA as the chipmaker, nor Asus as the card manufacturer, promised us any kind of support for our review samples. Indeed, both parties seemed rather reluctant to do so. It seems that the companies themselves are more than a bit wary of what Tom's Hardware had up and running here...

Despite being a unique and exciting premise for an article, it's a bit surprising to see THG post the benchmark results for F.E.A.R without a HUGE disclaimer on the same page. Those readers who skip straight to the benchmark results (don't we all?) will see the enormous performance increase and never realize that the in-game image was corrupted for the lower-third. Traditionally, editors shy away from posting any numbers when they encounter issues such as this because they do not reflect actual gameplay performance and have little to no value whatsoever.

Tags: sli, benchmarks, benchmark, AR, K

QUAD SLI w/ Benchmarks!

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