NVIDIA SLI Review - Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI (nForce4 SLI) Motherboard & 2 x 6800GT Vid Cards

Currently, the only two chipsets that are SLI certified is NVIDIA’s nForce 4 and Intel’s Tumwater chipset. In our testing today, we will be looking at Gigabyte’s GA-K8NXP-SLI and a pair of reference 6800GTs from NVIDIA along with Gigabyte’s single slot SLI 6600GT solution in the 3D1. It is important to note that SLI requires two of the same cards from the same manufacturer. This means that a 6800GT cannot be paired with a 6600GT. We have a reference 6600GT and a Gigabyte 6600GT that refuses to go into SLI mode even though the Gigabyte is just a reference board. Until there is a tool that allows a work around for this, end users should take care in choosing a card / brand that they are comfortable with as this is the only case where compatibility is more or less guaranteed.

…The entry fee to the SLI party will be what the end user puts into it. For those that have hit their blood and/or other body fluid selling quota for the month, a 6600GT and a SLI board is not a huge additional investment over a nForce 4 Ultra board. With several manufacturers set to introduce nForce 4 Ultra based boards capable of SLI including DFI, the price gap should continue to shrink between SLI and non-SLI capable boards. This does not imply that SLI for hardcore users will be cheap - a pair of 6800GTs or 6800 Ultras will go for roughly 800-1000$ though that is not too different from shelling out for the latest Athlon FX. We also suggest that end users who are interested in a pair of 6800GTs or higher to get an appropriately fast processor as the bottleneck will not be the video card in the majority of cases.

Like with the rest of the GeForce 6 family, NVIDIA has done an impressive job with SLI and is just riding more than just hype - they have the goods to back it up and literally bring next generation performance to the desktop today. In the span of roughly 8 months NVIDIA has managed to more than quadruple processing power in their GPU lineup. It almost puts the damper on next generation parts, but hey, they can be SLIed too. It is going to be a good year on the hardware side.

Neoseeker
Hands on With NVIDIA’s SLI