BFG says Core i7 is great news for SLI

Scaling the heights

When NVIDIA board partner BFG contacted us to point out that the performance of SLI, especially 3-way, systems was better than ever on Core i7/X58 systems, our first thought was "you would say that".

With all due respect to BFG, it's not too hard to see the vested interest for it in a claim that it's now a better idea than ever to buy three graphics cards instead of one. If you do that with the top-end GeForce GTX280, you're looking at north of a grand before you even get to the rest of the PC.

However, for people with that kind of money to burn, if there really is a significant benefit to be got from allying those cards with a Core i7 system they still might be tempted. So we conducted the following interview with BFG marketing dude Graham Brown to give him a chance to justify this claim.

HEXUS.channel: What effect will the launch of Core i7 have on the discrete graphics market?

Graham Brown: At the enthusiast level, we finally have a CPU that can do justice to amazing potential of SLI/3-way system. With the combination of Core i7, X58, and SLI/ 3-way system, enthusiasts can now benefit from a mass performance increase in scaling.

HC: Can you tell us more about how Core i7 affects scaling in multi-card graphics?

GB: All you have to do is take a look at the benchmarks coming out of respected publications, like HEXUS, to see that for ultimate performance you need 3-way BFG NVIDIA GeForce GTX280. This beast of a setup will produce frame rates that exceed any enthusiasts' expectations, playing every game at Ultra HD resolutions (much higher than even 'full-HD' TV manufacturers are talking about right now).

HC: How do SLI and Crossfire compare in this context?

GB: SLI is the only multi-GPU solution truly made for high-end enthusiasts. Do you want to make custom game profiles? You can only do so with SLI. It also takes advantage of NVIDIA's The Way It's Meant To Be Played (TWIMTBP) programme, meaning that games work with SLI straight away. If you buy the latest titles like Far Cry 2 you want to be sure they will work on day one with your hardware without having to wait for a driver or profile update.