GeForce 9800 GTX and 3-way SLI: May the nForce Be With You

Power Consumption

Final Words

So, now that we have the 9800 GTX in the mix, what has changed? Honestly, not as much in terms of performance stack as in price. Yes, the 8800 Ultra is better than the 9800 GTX where memory bandwidth is a factor, but other than that the relationship of the 9800 GTX to the 3870X2 is largely the same. Of course, NVIDIA would never sell 8800 Ultra below the 3870X2 price of $400 (the binned 90nm G80 glued on there didn’t come cheap).

The smaller die size of the G92 based 9800 GTX takes away one victory AMD had over NVIDIA: the more expensive 8800 Ultra was slower than AMD’s top of the line. Without significantly improving (and sometimes hurting) performance over the 8800 Ultra (because they didn’t really need to with the 9800 GX2 in their pocket), NVIDIA has brought more competition to AMD’s lineup, which is definitely not something they will be happy about.

It is nice to have this card come in at the $300 price point with decent performance, but the most exciting thing about it is the fact that picking up two of them will give you better performance than a single 9800 GX2 for the same amount of money. Two of them can even start to get by in Crysis with Very High settings (though it might offer a better experience with one or two features turned down a bit).

While our very limited and rocky experience with 3-way SLI may have been tainted by the engineering sample board we used, the fact that we can get near 9800 GX2 Quad SLI performance for 3/4 of the costs is definitely a good thing. The fact this set up MUST be run in an nForce board is a drawback, as we would love to test in a system that can run every configuration under the sun. We’re getting closer with Skulltrail, and we aren’t missing the fact that there are concerns among our readers over its use. But we’re confident that we can push performance up and turn it into our workhorse for graphics, especially now that the VSYNC issue has been cleared up.

While testing this group of cards has been difficult with all the problems we experienced, we are very happy to have a solid explanation for what was causing our decreased performance we were seeing. Now all we need is an explanation for why forcing VSYNC off in the driver causes such a huge performance hit.