NVIDIA Quad-SLI with the ASUS EN9800GX2

Performance Summary: A pair of ASUS EN9800GX2 cards running in a quad-SLI configuration showed increased performance in every application we tested versus a single GeForce 9800 GX2.  Overall, performance was extremely good and in the majority of tests the Quad-SLI configuration was the fastest of the bunch, occasionally by a large margin.

This most recent incarnation of NVIDIA's Quad-SLI technology is vastly superior to 2006's version.  A single GeForce 9800 GX2 is fast, but a pair of them running in Quad-SLI mode is extreme, albiet not for everyone.  Although we're certain Quad-SLI won't scale in every game, it did scale with every application we threw at it here today and its performance was top notch.  And in the near term, we expect NVIDIA to further improve Quad-SLI's performance scaling as well with upcoming driver releases.  What the long term future holds remains to be seen, however, because it is getting increasingly hard to leverage multi-GPU configurations with more advanced rendering techniques.

Quad-SLI with a pair of GeForce 9800 GX2 cards also consumes less power than the competition's quadruple GPU configuration.  While idling AMD's implementation used less power, but once put under load, NVIDIA's Quad-SLI was clearly more efficient - not only was it faster, but it used less power.

Of course, this kind of power comes at a price.  A pair of GeForce 9800 GX2 cards will currently set you back a cool $1200, provided you've already got the necessary nForce chipset-based platform to install them in.  Cutting edge PC hardware has always been an expensive proposition, however, so we're sure none of you are surprised by this.

In the end, we're impressed with GeForce 9800 GX2 Quad-SLI and hope NVIDIA continues to improve the technology.  Scaling is good, power consumption is high, but in line with expectations, and it actually costs less than a pair of GeForce 8800 Ultras did at launch.