Gigabyte 3D1 Graphics Card / Motherboard Bundle Review

Gigabyte’s 3D1 is an interesting product based on nVidia’s SLI technology. While all other manufacturers implementing SLI have done it using two separate cards and bridging them together, Gigabyte decided to skip the two cards process and make one card with two cores and connect them internally. The obvious advantage of this setup is that you don’t need two separate cards inside your PC, however, as per Gigabyte, the 3D1 card will only work with their K8NXP-SLI motherboard as it requires a special BIOS. That’s not much of a problem as currently this card can only be acquired by buying the K8NXP-SLI bundle- Gigabyte doesn’t sell the card separately.

While we didn’t test this card with other SLI boards, [H] did and they managed to have it up and running successfully in SLI mode on the ASUS AN8-SLI board. Another restriction that couldn’t be bypassed so easily is that nVidia never really designed the 6600GT GPU to work in an SLI mode under one card. Thus, Gigabyte’s specifications of 256bit/256MB for 3D1, while true- could be a bit misleading. To simplify, you have two separate 128bit/128MB buses on the 3D1 card permanently linked through an internal SLI bridge.

..So where does that leave the 3D1? The first thing is that you cant buy this card separately which really reduces the target market of this card. Only people opting for the Gigabyte SLI board can think about it- but should they? While it offers pretty good performance, the fact that you might not be able to use this card if you update your system will make you think twice. While we can certainly appreciate Gigabyte’s technological achievement with the 3D1, we just cannot recommend it unless nVidia loosens its grip on SLI and allows cards like 3D1 to be able to work with other chipset boards.

Gigabyte 3D1 Graphics Card
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