November 29, 2004

Nvidia SLI Graphic Card Benchmarks

The Tech Report ran benchmarks on Nvidia’s SLI graphics technology. Performance was excellent across today’s games like Far Cry, Half-life 2, and Doom 3, however there were significant system stability issues and lockups. I can’t believe the two graphics cards draws down almost 365 watts of power. You definitely need a super hefty power supply.

Adding a second GeForce 6800 Ultra card to the system increases its power consumption by 94 watts—nothing to sneeze at. With a GeForce 6800 Ultra SLI rig pulling 365W at the outlet, you're going to need a very beefy power supply and a case with exceptional cooling in order to make the system run stable. I should mention, however, that NVIDIA and Asus have some work to do on system stability. I ran into way too many lock-ups with the SLI test system during my testing. The problems were intermittent but came in bunches and seemed to be related to heat.
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