Quad Battle - Quad SLI vs Quad CrossfireX - NVIDIA contender
Author: Luka Rakamaric
Date: 15 Apr 2008

The second card is the 9800GX2 from NVIDIA and - more or less - uses the same principle as ATI does. You have two GPUs, double the memory and a bridge chip to allow the card to work on non SLI motherboards, in this case. Because NVIDIA’s GPUs are manufactured using a 65 nm process they opted to go with a two PCB design just like the 7950GX2 card a few years back. But this time they used a two slot cooler placed between the two GPUs. The PCB itself has holes in it to allow air to pass to the fan, so you lose some PCB space, but that’s why there are two. Contrary to ATI who was able to raise the clocks of the GPU but had to lower the memory clock, NVIDIA’s solution offers the opposite. Higher memory clock but lower GPU clock because of the cooling that’s not all that great for such hot chips. It does manage to keep everything stable, but it gets quite hot and loud. Not that ATI is any better in that regard; it’s just the price you have to pay if you use four GPUs (aside from using water cooling). You can read more on 9800GX2 in our single card review here.

We had to use two motherboards, because aside from the exotic Skulltrail there is no board that supports both of these configurations. We used NVIDIA 780i SLI for SLI benchmarking and Intel X38 chipset for CF setups.

- Intel Core 2 Quad QX9650
- Gigabyte X38-DQ6
- ASUS P5N-T 780i SLI
- OCZ PC2-8008 Platinum XTC 2x1GB
- PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 1KW-SR
- Western Digital RaptorX 150GB
- HP LP3065 30" LCD

As with all multi GPU setups, there is really no point in using them other than on big LCD display. We used an HP LP3065, which supports the 2560x1600 resolution. We also went one lower, 1920x1200, which is used on all 24’’ and some 22’’ displays. Anything lower than that will certainly get you system limitations in almost all scenarios, even with higher AA settings.

So, we didn’t really know what to expect because these are the first four-GPU DX10 cards, so we played a little with AA and AF settings to get some scaling in the games. Each was different so we will just say what the modes used were on the charts.

As for overclocking, the cards go a little higher, but it is all already so thermally stretched that we weren’t really comfortable with it.