Initial Thoughts
You'll have to wait for the rest of the articles, but I hope the initial look at things gives you some idea of the operating modes, what SLI can get you in terms of theoretical increases and also increases (or not) in real games. AFR is the dominant mode in the drivers at the time of writing, whether or not it offers the best performance or not, but overall it's a mode that works well. You really have to sit down in front of a system and play your favourite game, using AFR, to see if it's a mode that you can use comfortably.For Half-Life 2, Far Cry (although I didn't show it) and Doom3, AFR with a fast CPU is just what the doctor ordered keeping framerates high enough to mask the latency penalty.
Physical setup and configuration of an SLI system is a piece of cake. The continuity connector is fiddly, but you manipulate it once and leave it be.
I'll cover price-performance, the performance of 6800 GT and 6600 GT, temperature testing, noise, comparison with ATI graphics cards and other nuances of running in SFR and AFR mode in future articles this week, so keep your eyes peeled.
As an aside, and I'm loathe to mention it, my general feeling from testing in the last few weeks is that SLI as a platform doesn't actually feel finished quite yet, using pre-release hardware. The driver interface isn't great, crashes and performance issues in certain titles still persevere and two Ultras in a loaded system get hot. Despite performance, which is undoubtedly very impressive, there's still a lot more than just framerate to consider as you ponder going down the SLI route.
A lot of that is undoubtedly down to the silicon revision of the bridge used on the ASUS mainboard and there's also the ribbon connector to factor into things. The change to PCB connectors across the board is to ensure correct signal and dady integrity, with the ribbon connector not meeting up to NVIDIA's exacting standards. I'm confident that shipping SLI hardware released to mass-market retail will have the vast majority of the issues ironed out. However I'm duty bound to report my findings during initial testing and as always, using pre-release hardware is frought with uncertainties and hardware hiccups. Bear that in mind before chastising NVIDIA for an unstable platform.
Anyway, I'll cover all that in due course, along with reviews of two full SLI workstation systems from an SI. Stay tuned.
