Three-waySli
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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 set up in 3-way SLI, tested against Radeon HD 5870 and 5970
Not many mortals will ever have to worry about choosing between a three-way GeForce GTX 480 SLI setup, an equally numerous Radeon HD 5870 array, or a dual-card HD 5970 monstrosity, but we know plenty of people would care about who the winner might be. Preliminary notes here include the fun facts that a 1 Kilowatt PSU provided insufficient power for NVIDIA's hardware, while the mighty Core i7-965 test bench CPU proved to be a bottleneck in some situations. Appropriately upgraded to a six-core Core i7-980X and a 1,200W power supply, the testers proceeded to carry out the sacred act of benchmarking the snot out of these superpowered rigs. We won't spoil the final results of the bar chart warfare here, but rest assured both camps score clear wins in particular games and circumstances. The source link shall reveal all.
NVIDIA gets official with 3-way SLI for "extreme gaming"
It's taken a bit longer than expected, but NVIDIA has finally announced that it's extended its SLI technology to allow for three-way setups, in addition to the usual two or four-way ones. That, the company says, should give you a 2.8x performance increase over a single GPU system, letting you crank up all the settings while accepting nothing less than a full 60 frames per second. That will come at a pretty hefty cost, of course, as you'll need three GeForce 8800 GTX or GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics cards, not to mention a PC capable of accommodating them. If that's not an impediment for you, however, you should soon be basking in the glow of 384 stream processors, a 110+ gigatexel per second texture fill rate, and no less than two gigabytes of graphics memory.
