Triple Nvidia SLI vs Triple ATI Crossfire
The chaps over at GameSpot have posted Triple Nvidia SLI vs Triple ATI Crossfire comparison. They used a $4,500 gaming rig from CyberPower, with an Intel Core i7 980X running at 4.2GHz, to run the batch of tests. Here's an excerpt:
Despite all of the cooling efforts, we still saw high temperatures: 93 degrees. But that was with three GeForce GTX 480s in there and running for hours on end. We saw slightly lower temperature levels with three Radeon HD 5870s. Three power-hungry GPUs jammed into the space of a toaster are bound to cause trouble.
The machine can live in a well-cooled area, but we'd hesitate to recommend using it in a room with no air conditioning, and we definitely wouldn't recommend running it in the dead of summer. Of course, if you have nearly $5,000 to spend on a computer, it's likely you're not skimping on air conditioning. After multiple hours of testing on both setups, we would see the occasional graphical glitch or corrupted texture, which went away if we simply let the GPUs cool down a bit. The cooldown is relatively quick and probably took no longer than 10 to 20 seconds once all graphical load was gone. Complexity
Running two GPUs in a system is complicated, but adding a third and possibly a fourth doesn't help matters. In testing both setups, we encountered our fair share of anomalies; quirks that one might expect from being on the bleeding edge. But they certainly weren't something anyone would be thrilled about after spending more than $1,500 on the GPUs alone.
With triple Crossfire, we could not get Eyefinity working with all three cards enabled in Crossfire mode, leaving us to game on a single monitor. The moment we disabled triple Crossfire mode, we regained the ability to play on multiple monitors. We imagine ATI will address this in time. Until then, it's certainly not a great reason to grab three of these cards. We did get Eyefinity working with two GPUs, though.
On the Nvidia side, the company has yet to enable 3D Vision Surround, a feature that requires SLI. The company aims to enable this feature with the next release of its 256 driver, which should occur at the end of June. 3D Vision Surround enables multimonitor gaming, as well as 3D, which requires special monitors and Nvidia's 3D glasses.
