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

Early Thoughts...

I am actually quite pleasantly surprised at how well 3-way SLI actually works at this early stage and, in fact, I’m almost lost for words – that’s generally not a good thing in my line of work. If you compare this brief experience with the time we spent playing with Quad-SLI on some of the top games at that point in time, they couldn’t be much farther apart. The difference is almost like night and day; north and south; east and west... you get the idea.

Unlike Quad-SLI, which we had no end of problems with, this wasn’t something sent to us by Nvidia in a highly-polished gold flight case, packed to the brim with velvet bubble wrap. Not once did we experience a crash during our time playing around with 3-way SLI and this was on a system that was built and configured by ourselves... rather quickly I might add.

The downside of course is that this kind of set up is going to require some megabucks in order to see the benefits. You really need at least a 1920x1200 screen (when you look at Crysis on its own) and a 2560x1600 screen for anything else. That, on top of the graphics cards, is going to set you back about £2,000 and I haven't even started on the rest of the system. Yeah, it’s not cheap.

But then, Nvidia has never claimed that this would be anything but expensive. In fact, the company’s representatives don’t expect to see many users running 3-way SLI for that matter – it’s doing it just because it can; because it wants to. And knowing Nvidia’s CEO and President, Jen-Hsun Huang, quite well – I can probably guess at what his reaction was to the hard words we dished out when Quad-SLI launched.

He’s an enthusiast, a very determined and passionate guy and he could have hidden away from scaling to more than just two GPUs after the initial failure with Quad-SLI. He didn’t though and I’m sure that his determination is part of the reason why we’re seeing 3-way SLI being announced today.

Yes, it’s a technical demonstration, but from everything we’ve seen so far, it looks to be a pretty good one. We just need some more games that can really take advantage of this kind of power – it’s down to you, Roy.