Sites fire up Quad SLI GX2 rigs

THE GX2 IS the most powerful graphics card around today, but you pay the price and always get the feeling the gas mileage isn’t all that good. This, however, seems to deliver customer satisfaction of the utmost degree. Tweakers at TT got hold of a non-discriminate, reference-designed 9800GTX and ran the numbers. Although it’s a single GPU solution, you can tri-SLI these bad boys into what we’re sure to be record-breaking 3Dmarks... if only they hadn’t designed the card with 2x6 PCIe power connectors (meaning it’ll take a total of six to run tri-SLI). Spanking good performance.

On the other hand the GX2 is also being fired up in quad mode on several sites, namely PC Perspective, Anandtech, Xbit Labs and Guru 3D. It can be quite frustrating, it seems, to have a quad-SLI rig and still get relatively low gains over standard SLI. When it comes to AA+AF the Quad SLI does come into its own, but standard frame rates aren’t benefitting all that much from the 4 GPUs. It does look like, in the end, the muscle is there, but there’s no brain coordinating the muscles to best effect. Quad-SLI kicks the competition all over the place in CoD4 4xAA, ET:QW and Stalker. Oblivion is AMD’s turf right now. A lot of games still show weird behaviour with GX2 and GX2x2.

EXPReview has worked out an interesting article comparing scaling performance in SLI between the 9600GT and the 8800GT across several driver releases. With the release of the latest ForceWard drivers, they hooked up the cards, two by two and unleashed driver dreariness on them. 8800GT SLI keeps on receiving decent performance upgrades with each new release, with SLI efficiency jumping as high as 50% in a single game (Bioshock). However, the 9600GT SLI exceeds even the 8800GT. You can extrapolate some figures for your own rig from what you read here, so it really is highly educational. Kewl.

If there’s a segment in which ATI has made a dent it’s what we’d call "home entertainment GPUs". ATI’s 55nm RV6xx series is low power, low price and has lots of neat features in it, ideal for HTPCs and low-budget computers alike. Extremetech has a review of Sapphire’s HD 3650 and tries to answer the 100-dollar question: does it suffice? Well, yes, thinks Jason. Although it’s no 8800GT, it does allow you to game fairly well in all types of games, with some details cut down. In the end it still does score about five times as much as any IGP in 3DMark06, so there you have it.

BigBruin is in possession of an Aeneon XTune 1GB DDR2-1066 Dual Channel memory kit. Granted 2x512MB might seem of little consequence to many enthusiasts, as they usually tend to fill their slots from the start – but you might consider picking up the 2GB kit which is pretty much more of the same – good performance at a reasonable price. Apparently Aeneon also has DDR2-1142 which BB is yearning to take a look at. Read the review here. µ