Quad SLi(2x9800GX2)

Hardly a week has passed since the launch of the new monster 9800GX2 and nVidia has launched a product to blow ATi out of the competition with its (partially)new technology-Quad SLi! This technology makes an enabled rig a different animal altogether.

REQUIREMENTS

I know you cant wait to know what you need for setting up a quad SLi rig! Here it goes:

• 2(yes! two!) Nvidia 9800GX2
• A number crunching processor(at least 2.7GHz dual core)
• 2GB of ultra fast memory
• Fully patched Windows Vista
• A monitor supporting at minimum of 1920x1200 resolution.
  
• 850W or higher PSU
• Games!

As you can see, Quad SLi is a costly affair and you'll have to pay your nose out to get your hands dirty on one. A piece of advice- spending such a huge amount will be pointless if you won't be playing games at very high resolutions(above 1920x1200).

OUR TEST RIG

Processor: Intel Core 2 Extreme 3.2GHz

Motherboard: Nvidia 790i SLi

Memory: 2x1 GB Corsair DDR3

That's some serious horsepower for our beast.

PERFORMANCE (Call of Duty 4)

The rig shattered our first benchmark- Call of Duty 4. At a resolution of 2560x1600, 4x Anti Aliasing, 16x Anisotropic filtering and all the settings maxed out, the rig cruised at 104 FPS versus 57FPS recorded by a single 9800GX2 with the same components!

PERFORMANCE (Crysis)

The rig performed poorly in crysis. The rate went down terribly at higher resolutions. The frame rate was only 4FPS better than a single 9800GX2. Maybe, a few driver updates will fix the problem.

The main problem with Quad SLi is that due to the huge load of data transfer between the four GPUs, the processor is put under a lot of stress. So, QSLi shows its real power only at resolutions above 1920x1200.

PERFORMANCE (3d Mark 06)

The performance at default settings was nothing special. At 16152, it was slightly lower than the single card.

PEFORMANCE(GRAW 2)

Again, here, due to the CPU bottlenecks, Quad SLi shows its power only at higher resolutions. The QSLi setup beats the single card by a huge margin at 2560x1600, amazing!

PERFORMANCE(F.E.A.R.)

This benchmark shows exactly what was expected from it. Forget words! Look at the results!

FINAL WORD

So, is four better than two? Both yes and no! Yes when Quad SLi works well. And no when scaling problems arise like in Crysis.

But at present, I don't see the need to invest in a second 9800GX2 as the games run just fine with "one" 9800GX2. And when they don't, like in Crysis, the Quad SLi fails too.Also, 56 FPS is equally playable as 110 FPS, so, why invest so much? You could add another card to your setup at a later time.