Testing NVIDIA SLI (GeForce 6800/6600 PCI-E) On Intel i7525 Platform

Will SLI be an additional AMD trump card for promoting its solutions among Hardcore Gamers? It’s hard to say so far, because nForce4 is not yet properly available (only early samples). Besides, as I have already said, SLI connectors are not to be found on sale yet and they are not shipped with video cards so far. And we have information that they will not be shipped later either. Only vendors selling motherboards based on nForce4 SLI will include such adapters into the bundle.

Thus, we are approaching the chapter devoted to testing video cards. As it’s clear from the title of the article, we shall test only Intel platforms today. Readers should understand that this solution is not designed for games, and even Xeon 3.4 GHz together with a powerful motherboard demonstrated that the performance dropped even lower than previously on Pentium4 3.2GHz (i875P) (registered DDR333 memory is much slower than well-known DDR400). Nevertheless we got very interesting results.

…So, I guess it’s perfectly clear that the SLI technology is effective. It even provides excellent performance gains where system resources do not lay severe limits. All this happens even despite that one PCI-Express slot operates as x16, and the second – only x4 (there are almost no other options, only x8+x8 is theoretically possible)).

…I have also tested SLI with GeForce 6600GT + GeForce 6800GT. It won’t work. To be more exact, it works with glitches and problems.

On the whole one can say that SLI made its debut. In the second part of this material we’ll analyze test results for nForce4 SLI and only then we’ll draw our conclusions – how it fares on more gaming-like platform. Though untuned drivers for nForce may have their effect there, because drivers from Intel are well known for their stability and fine-tuned characteristics, especially system ones.

I think that if the market offers more motherboards with two PCi-E slots, SLI will definitely be successful, even stunningly successful.

Digit Life
Testing NVIDIA SLI (GeForce 6800/6600 PCI-E).
Part 1 – i7525 Platform