First Look: Nvidia 3-way SLI on nForce 680i

Test Setup:

As always, we did our best to deliver a clean set of benchmarks, with each test repeated three times -- the average of those results is what we're reporting here. In the rare case where performance is inconsistent, we continued repeating the test until we got three results that were consistent.

Due to the short time we've had with the hardware, we've only tested three different configurations in a limited selection of games.

• 3x Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra 768MB in 3-way SLI -- operating at their default clock speeds of 612/1500/2160MHz using Forceware 169.18
  
• 2x Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra 768MB in SLI -- operating at their default clock speeds of 612/1500/2160MHz using Forceware 169.18
  
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra 768MB -- operating at its default clock speeds of 612/1500/2160MHz using Forceware 169.18

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (operating at 3.00GHz -- 9x333MHz); Asus Striker Extreme motherboard (nForce 680i SLI); 2 x 1GB Corsair XMS2-8500C5 (operating in dual channel at DDR2-800 with 4-4-4-12-1T timings); Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 200GB SATA hard drive; Thermaltake Toughpower 1500W PSU; Windows Vista Ultimate x86; Nvidia nForce standalone drivers version 15.01 WHQL.

Games Tested:

We used the following versions of the games listed to have a quick look at the performance of Nvidia's 3-way SLI configuration:

• Crysis, version 1.1.1.5767 with DirectX 10 and DirectX 9.0*
  
• BioShock, version 1.0 with DirectX 10 and DirectX 9.0
  
• Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, version 2.1.0.3 with DirectX 10
  
• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, version 1.1.0

* Note: there is a patch for Crysis which is expected to be released very shortly. It promises to improve multi-GPU scaling performance, so you may see better scaling than what we have seen in our tests here as we have tested without that patch applied as it is still undergoing QA testing.