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

I do.. sli is silly unless you need the speed right now for what your doing.

 

I'm a bit sad in that a new board for my system has to be purchased this weekend. I'm going to miss out on the 780i by a week!

3x $250 = $750
3x $500 = $1500
ATI has nothing to compete, NV's got us by the balls.

 

Well there won't be unless ATI pulls their finger out, what is the point of expensive product development and launches if you're already miles ahead of the competition?

 

OMG

Nice tech review guys

3 cards!!! why oh why oh why
You must need to wear an asbestos/space suit in order to go anywhere near such a system.

 

Lead underwear, tbh. Just being in the presence of such awesome gaming power will make your gonads retract back into your belly.

And that is before you saw the electricity bill..

 

how did you power the 3rd card? i wasnt aware of any psu's that had more then 4x PCI-X power lines?

 

CrossfireX, enabled on the 790 chipset (whenever that gets here).

 

There are some, surprisingly... we've used Thermaltake's Toughpower 1500W unit... comes with 4x 6-pin and 4x 8-pin PCI-E connectors (with two 8-pin to 6-pin adapters).

 

so to play Crysis at very high, i'll need 3x 8800Ultra in Tri Sli or a single graphics card with 3x the processing power of current graphics card to have a playable framerate :O

damn, there goes my dream of maxing Crysis when i upgrade to Geforce series 9

 

Sorry about that Jodiuh should have said most instead of everyone but still $250 is still better than $1500

 

sorry thats $750 is better than $1500

 

I'm all for pushing technology forwards, but this is just silly.

 

Are you having a laugh

The sheer awesomeness of this is astounding.

3 x 8800ULTRA and a bad ass intel quad core and it will be amazing.

 

OUCH to the electricity bill. Any chance it *might* remotely be available to some other cards?

Having 3 cards means you have no room for anything else, isn't it time for taller motherboards with space to actually put your sound and TV cards?

 

for how tight everything is squeezed in, it would be nice to see a new format with maybe an extra inch or two.
my 1950 pro is a tight fit, I dont think that 3 8800's would even make it in.

 

You need antialiasing at 2560x1600?

 

Hmmm, £1600 worth of hardware still only gets you roughtly 40fps in Crysis (max eye candy) and 32ish in Vista.

Ohh..the madness

 

Anyone else wanna see someone water cool these bad boys... then connect the pipes to their central heating?

 

This is pretty awesome but something seems a little odd about going down the path of multiple GPUs while Intel is already going the route of multiple core CPUs. Seems to me the burden of heavy graphics processing could be shifted back over to the CPU. That would be a much more economically viable solution than telling people to throw an extra $700 graphics card into their system whenever a new card-busting game emerges. If the burden were on the CPU, then each new CPU generation containing a larger number of cores would theoretically result in automatic performance increases in games. Sure there would be inefficiencies using a "regular" CPU core to process graphics, but think about the scaling. If you had an 8 core CPU perhaps 4 cores could be devoted to processing graphics in parallel and some of the inefficiencies might be mitigated by the shared cache between the cores. I realize there are many hardware-level efficiencies built in to graphics cards, but I'm a little puzzled that Intel hasn't atleast explored the possibilities since they would stand to gain quite a bit.

 

sound card goes where?