No use kidding around:
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 3-Way SLI kicks benchmark ass. Reviewers across the board found the setup to be far and away the best money can buy when it comes to graphics, but the price is certainly steep. Not only are the cards super pricey -- you're limited to the 8800 GTX and 8800 Ultra -- but you'll need a 1000+ watt power supply, and pretty much a fresh system from the ground up unless you're already running the nForce 680i SLI motherboard. PC Perspective crunched the numbers, and you're looking at about $2828 in costs before you even get to the case, hard drive, DVD drive and all that other superfluous stuff. That said, the third card really makes a big difference, since performance scales surprisingly well with the addition. You probably don't need this kind of power if you're not trying to game at full-res on a 30-incher, but if you don't mind dropping $3k on a system purely designed to play Crysis at Very High, then you just might have some 3-way SLI in your future.
Read - bit-tech.net
Read - HotHardware
Read - PC Perspective
posted December 14th 2007 10:33AM
The key would always be this: do you go for ultimate gaming to 780i board with 3 cheap 8800GTX or do you buy a board for 2 ATI X2 cards to get BETTER performance for mist new games, when ATI claims that their 3870 X2's are Shader 4.1 and NVIDIA's 8800's are 4.0 and DX10.1-compliant for 3870X2 vs. DX10 for 8800 and everyone claiming that since NVIDIA do not intend to keep the 8x class going, 3-SLI will likely happily die when the 9x cards come out. SO why waste money on an idea meant to live a couple of months?
I wish I had the money to build something this extravagant... But my single 8800GT does what I need it to.
*rubs hands*
I get my 8800GT today. Tracking says it delivered to the office. Can't wait to replace that 6800GT Ultra.
I would've loved to get my 8800GT, but it hasn't hit the price point it's supposed to yet - the $200ish mark. Instead I got a 8600GTS that still can't play Call of Duty 2 (a relatively old game by now!) on high =/
My single 8800 Ultra throws off enough heat to warm a house (85C under full load, almost enough to boil water). I can't IMAGINE three of these, inside a case, running that close to each other.
That being said, what's the benchmark for super-high res outdoor scenes in Oblivion? :)
You are sooo right about the heat so I did this (cold air intake):
http://www.eternal-champions.com/images/chilver_4x4.jpg
(2x8800 GTX's SLI'ed in a 4x4 Rig) NOW THATS HEAT for ya!
Oh and not to mention the power bill bump ;^(...
That's a pretty impressive setup. I added a 120mm intake fan directly below my single card, so it'll draw cool air up. Lowered my temps quite a bit. I also have a 110mm CPU fan, 120mm case exhaust fan, and an 80mm intake fan. Next step is going to be water cooling, though I don't know how much it'll help.
What ever happened to making parts take up less ports? This contraption, while boosts gaming to the next level, will be replaced by a light weight combined version soon enough. At least you get a lot more (3X more) for you money :)
What percentage performance jump do you get with the third card?
I wish the EU would slap a tax on power hogging PCs, e.g. those over 450W. It might motivate the CPU & GPU manufacturers to make more efficient designs rather than just strapping monster fans onto their creations to dissipate the wasted heat.
Not everyone can afford a power hungery beast, let alone 3 of them.
Couldn't agree more, a new energy efficient focus with GPUs would be my dream. I think CPUs are a bit better in this department though, Intel seem to be pushing towards more efficient designs.
Whatever. the power a pc uses is infinitesimally small compared to the energy needed to create your tree hugger biofuels. But it all sounds great, doesn't it? I wish Global Warming would hurry up, Im cold!
These three cards are nothing, compared to the power of the Force!
Actually if you look at the 8800GT and new NV92 GTS, there are a good deal more power effecient.
What you may fail to realize with computers is that increasing power effeciency is a GOOD thing from a performance perspective too. Designing chips that use less power mean they generate less heat, which means they can be pushed to higher clock speeds.
This is also a HUGE thing in the regular CPU market. Power-saving is obviously key for laptops, but server CPUs need it as well to reduce data center energy costs. And this translates into normal desktop CPUs, since that is the basis of server CPUs. The Core 2's and newer AMD X2's consume a lot less power (~65W vs 90+).
Something else to note is that the power supply is rarely pushed near its maximum, and most PCs actually use a lot less than what their PC is capable of. A 8800Ultra SLI system can run on a good quality 650W PSU with the proper number of 12V rails...the 1KW PSU's are not necessary. (Unless you have a lot of HDD's)
Also taxing these would be extremely difficult to do...most of these are pieced together part by part. Sure you could tax the power supply, but then you would just see people using multible 450W supplies to bypass the tax. (That seems to be a tragic flaw with most liberal ideas...they aren't bad concepts, but they are rarley thought out to step two-practical implementation).
I thought the same exact as you at one time; however, it appears that at least in the CPU department, they're doing exactly this. Just look at Intel's new Core 2 Duo processors compared with the old P4s. SIGNIFICANTLY less heat generation and power consumption, but so much more performance and efficiency.
My old Athlon XP 2500+ used to IDLE at 51-55 C. Right now my Core 2 Duo E4500 @ 2.3 GHz (an extremely mild overclock - I'm still working through a few RAM issues so this is all for now - only about 100 MHz) is idling at 23 C. When it starts up its at 18-21. 18 degrees. My god.
Under "normal" load (meaning not torture test programs like Prime95), it doesn't go over 33ish. However, I still have yet to figure out a way of loading both cores without making my computer unusuable (loading the processors so much the rest of the system fails to respond to my mouse and keyboard inputs completely).
I realise power efficiency is a good thing. I would be delighted if chips ran cold since it would mean they're maximizing all their power to run rather than wasting it as heat. Everyone loves good graphics performance but I get the impression that GPU makers have placed power efficiency way down their list. Aside from environment concerns, the straight fact is that if a GPU consumes 200W+ or whatever to run, that represents a significant annual expense over the price the card cost in the first place. The EU seems to be the only place with the teeth to slap a tax on such devices so that's why I think they should do it. If someone is rich and desperate enough to buy a power hogging device they can, but the very existence of a tax would send many people the other way and act as a powerful incentive for manufacturers to make sure they don't cross it.
pushing stuff like this and getting it to work is just one of the steps towards the goal you are suggesting for chip developers.
You've got to get the technology working in some state before you can start optimizing/minimizing it. SLI is the closest we've got for now.
When did people get so uptight about the efficiency ratings of gpus? I don't care how much a gpu draws just so long as it's fast. The faster the better and efficiency be damned. I feel the same about cars.
Hope your kids can swim
What Xavier said. Living at higher altitude, hm?
There was a time, long long ago, early in the last decade of the last millennium, when people coding games for Commodore machines learned to produce ever more amazing graphics from the ever same hardware. They solved their problems with BETTER CODE instead of hotter hardware. The same attitude can sometimes still be seen in console gaming. But then again the whole present PC-gaming market is based on the principles of shameless and enduring exploitation... I agree with the notion that wasteful systems should have some sort of significant eco-tax slapped on.
Mine will, like fishes, and they'll be able to kick your kids ass(es) any (97 degree arctic-winter swim race) day.
You've never seen graphics from the first XBox games and compared them to recent games? There is only so much a system is capable of, though. It is impossible to replicate even a still frame from a modern game on old hardware. Old systems would buckle under the strain of running just the AI.
You're right, we should still just be using 100 Voodoo cards on our PCI buses with re-re-re-re-repatched Windows 3.1
Dude, *read*. You take a fixed platform and you maximize your code until it is so efficient that you can exploit all of the platforms potential. That's the rational approach. You can observe this by looking at a [random outdated console] release title and a title from around when the console got canceled.
Then there is the wasteful approach where you just code up fantastic castles in the sky and keep throwing juice-guzzling hardware at it until they work well because you know a random number of gamers will happily dump their [parents'] income on making [latest hip game] run smoothly, so coders can be lazy and hardware makers smile all the way to the bank. That's PC-gaming.
Well, we don't have fixed platforms, do we? Consoles are the only appropriate area for fixed platforms. I don't want to buy a computer and be stuck with the same hardware until it breaks and then have to replace the whole thing. My laptop ran fine on XP put I knew that having 512MB of RAM was holding me back. I fixed that by getting more RAM. Then my hard drive failed. I didn't have to spend hundreds of dollars on a new laptop because I knew I could spend $100 on a new, better drive.
If you blame games needing better hardware on code-bloat, you are an idiot and insult computer scientists everywhere. People want games with realistic physics and graphic. Would you blame a scientist's need for a supercomputer on code-bloat?
No dude, I'm just stating my point that excessive and rather pointless upgrades in PC-gaming are a shameful waste of all sorts of resource in an industry designed pretty much around that concept.
You on the contrary are rude cretin unable to differentiate apples from oranges, therefore your inept attempt to create an argument is liberally excused.
Please define excessive and pointless. My 4 year old laptop is what the pinnacle of excess and pointlessness was 20 years ago. Today, I can be productive anywhere in the world. The game developers can be thanked in part for that.
What you don't seem to realize is that pointless exercises are often what drive technology forward.
You're still in apple/orange land...
If you want to see a possible definition of excessive and pointless, scroll up.
Of course demand drives progress, nobody denies that. This does not make setups like this any bit less wasteful. One would assume leading products would impress with excellent performance at very high efficiency. They do not. They are expensive little electric heaters. Your old lappy (which by the way is unlikely to have anything much in common with a 20 year old system unless its carved out of wood and was hopelessly outdated the day you bought it) has nothing to do with it, as in fact a laptop is usually all about efficiency, and neither does being able to replace a failing component.
Just because YOU see it as pointless and excessive doesn't mean it is. Who are YOU to tell me what is pointless and excessive? That setup is far more efficient than an equally-speced setup from 5 years ago.
I'm a happy dweller in our shared biosphere, that's who I am :)
Also, I am concerned about said biosphere, as apparently there is already something terribly wrong with the water supply where you live. As this is another post of pretty much nonargument nature from your side: EOD.
This is whare my income went.
Put it this way: I have a passively cooled 2600XT in the post.
Needs a 1100Watt powersupply??? Game and dry my wash at the same time!
psssh...wake me up when you can play Crysis at 60+ fps
/pretension
Its time to wake up, or buy a new computer, your choice.
...and get a second mortgage.
I'm running Crysis on a Hewlett Packard M9060N Quad Core with
4GB RAM (total cost $1600 with LCD 19" monitor)
It runs perfectly fine in VERY HIGH. My only problem is that the game itself is so straight forward unlike Call of Duty 4.
Thats because 19" screens have a relatively low resolution these days. Monster rigs like that one are only really intended for 24"+ screens
Crysis runs on my quad-core rig at 1600x1200 at Very High perfectly.
$1600, 8800Ultra, Zalmann 9700 HSF so I can overclock my Q6600 to 3.6GHz, 4GB of RAM, 680i mobo. I built it just so I could play Crysis at Very High :D.
Crysis will not run "perfectly fine" on very high setting with any current single card solution, regardless of resolution... OK, maybe at 1024X768, but there are no 19"ers at that res.
You are either making this up, or you're content with slide show like frame rates.
Actually, there are 19 inch monitors with higher than 1024x768 resolutions.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8550613&type=product&id=1188560797713
eMachines 19 inch TFT monitor (LCD) at 1440x900.
@ Spyvie
Are you saying that no 19" screens have more than 1024x768? Honestly? You're an idiot! I have the cheapest 19" LCDs I could find, brand "Starlogic" and they, along with pretty much every other 19" screen, run at 1280x1024 native resolution.
He was implying that the native resolution of the screen must have been 1024x768. Any higher than that and it would become a "slideshow". I see his point, he meant there were none *as low as* 1024x768.
But, I average a Fraps-verified 40-50FPS on Very High at 1600x1200. Using one card.
Isn't funny that so much money effort and ott'ness goes in to the most unproductive of activities, gaming. Im an animator and thats just ridiculous.
Yeah, god forbid that people have fun in their spare time.
Gaming is pushing the hardware that you will use as an animator to make your life better. You should be thanking the gamers. ;)
Totally with you on that one Bob.
What ever happened to good old days when fun consisted of sitting in a hard chair and reading the bible? Or mowing the lawn? Now there is some productive leisure.
The real question is, will it blend?
Uhh... I think the packaging says the cards when run in SLI need to have two slots between each other... Of course what self-respecting geek actually heeds these warnings? I just thought I'd point it out.
Also... I'm wondering... I know a normal SLI setup can power up to four displays at once. What I want to know is, can this power six? Or is it capped at four?