Quad SLI gets beating from X1900XT CrossFire

OH MY. When I went on a trip to test QuadSLI, I had no idea I would be writing this kind of story. Sure, the clock speeds on the QuadSLI machine are pretty tuned down compared to the retail 7900GTX boards, but the surprise kinda left me in a state of wondering what on Earth is going on. We're not interested in excuses, since we're talking about shipping products here. Standard answer - it's beta or unproven hardware, it has beta drivers. You need real money to buy the cards, not "beta-money".

While taking a bite into the whole Quad SLI situation, an interesting thing happened.

In the game officially endorsed by Nvidia, the Call of Duty 2 - QuadSLI took a beating from X1900XT in CrossFire mode. Sadly, we had no 7900GTX SLI at our disposal, since Nvidia decided not to support our Quad SLI review and I haven't seen a single 7900GT/GTX in our Lab. However, we've gotten our hands on the actual hardware, thanks to our friends in the industry. And we're benching the product 130 street numbers away from Nvidia's Munich office. Such is destiny.

To get back to the subject - the worst thing is that it's not only in one weird resolution. To be more precise, on our test machine, X1900XT ends up in front of Quad SLI for 1280x1024, 1280x800 and for 1600x1200. With and without 4xAA and 16xAnisotropic Filtering. Alarmstufe rot, as the Germans might say. The Quad SLI surged ahead in 1920x1200 and above, but not in the stomping way you would expect. Of course, in 1920x1200 with 4xAA and 16xAF the quad GPU system is a scorcher.

Battlefied 2 is a bit unstable, but I am downloading the latest patch right now. Sadly, I can't go into a store and buy a mission pack, since it's Labour Day here in Germany, and across Europe. All is not brilliant in other two The Way It's Meant To Be Played games: Doom III and World of Warcraft. In our Doom III timedemo, QuadSLI looses out in 1024x768, 1280x1024, but catches up in 1600x1200 without FSAA and Anisotropic Filtering. With 4xAA and 16xAF, the performance deficit on QuadSLI still persists in lower resolutions. Getting weirder.

World of Warcraft, however, is built to run using a single-GPU only, no matter what we have done in driver profiles. And in such conditions, X1900XT just speeds past "poor" 7900GX2. The game is CPU bound anyway. To give s positive note for Nvidia, even 7800GTX 512MB beats X1900XTX in our WoW test, so you have an idea how 7900GT/GTX/SLI runs.

It is incredible to see that two GPU configurations are capable of outdoing and outperforming a quad system, which is, in theory and marchitecture talk - around 60% more powerful than X1900XT CrossFire. Our First Inqpression mentioned the initial problems with the testing setup. We can report now that everything works flawlessly - thanks to a phenomenal PC Power & Cooling 1000W Power Supply unit and 2GB of system memory. ?