Quad SLI= fail

What bothers me the most about modern GPU coolers is how they change speed frequently while gaming. It even depends on what you are looking at in the game. My 8800GTX became very annoying in Oblivion, for example, because the noise level changed depending on the scenery. My Radeon 3850 was louder and changed RPM even more frequently. It sounded like I had a little hair drier in the PC.

So, both cards got their coolers replaced with aftermarket solutions. The 8800GTX has a Thermalright HR-03 Plus and the 3850 has an Accelero S1. The Accelero S1 is incredible kit for $30, IMO. HR-03 may be incredibly effective, but it's really too expensive (especially w/o the fan it requires). Both of these coolers dramatically outperform the OEM coolers with respect to thermals with only very slow fans, while also being basically inaudible. 5-volted 92 mm on the GTX and a slow (~800 RPM) 80 mm on the 3850.

It bothers me to see the G80 cooler described as quiet, because it was anything but that in my opinion. Well, unless it's idle, because then it is quite quiet as it is spinning very slowly. The cooler seems to run at 100% once the GPU reaches 85 C, which was what happened with most recent games.

I'd like to see a more descriptive take on the sound of each card. Whether it's high-pitched, low-pitched, and whether or not it changes speed a lot.

It still seems to me that the HD3870X2 is the best single card solution and at the price, it's really hard beat.

My gaming rig has an 8800GTS (640) and my Mac has the X1900XT. While the 8800GTS is faster, the image quality on the ATI card seems to be better.

A good review, but (IMHO) I can't understand the point in the noise analysis. I mean, you can do that in power consumption, that's ok, power consumption is linear. If you change just the graphic card, the difference in PC is the difference between the two cards. That's OK.

But, in noise, 30dB + 10 dB doesn't mean 40 dB. This noise analysis is only valid for that rig, in any other case, it means nothing. In fact, seeing the results, is obvious that there are two options: Most cooler are the same (+-1dB) or we are measuring the Intel Stock cooler under load. And a little explanation about what means the charts would be great too, dB are not watts and you can't read a logarithmic chart as you read lineal chart.

There are ppl out there (like me) who wants the better bang/buck/noise ratio (i.e. for gaming HTPC), and in this review (great in every other aspect), that part is seriously lacking. Is it so difficult to set a test rig all passive to do that tests? It would be a cheap rig (low-end micro, low end almost everything), and it would tell us something more relevant than Crossfire x4 or 2560x1600 test. Seriously, think about it. How many ppl might be considering Crossfire x4 and how many ppl might prefer a quieter card ?

I think that would made this good review in an almost perfect one.

Edit: Typos

Rather than get too pedantic about db levels why not trust in the TR guys to report their findings in a simple and easy to understand format that would have broad appeal?

eg. Noise testing results:

It was... (A) silent *passive cooling*
(B) quiet
(C) ok
(D) noticable
(E) noisy
Isn't that good enough?

So, a under powered card with less memory that runs just a tid-bit faster then it's previous generation is an advancement???..... I'll keep nVidia's last real accomplishment, my 2x liquid-cooled 8800 ultras from BFG thank you.

Wake me when they actually make something work my attention and money.

Mojo

be interesting to see how Hybrid graphics pans out, that'll really be having your cake and eating it, at least from a power consumption point of view :)

How are we supposed to trust this review if the CPU being used is only a Dual-Core? You can't test 4 GPU cores released in 2008 with 2 CPU cores released in 2006..

Did you guys notice that in Crysis benchmarks increase in resolution and AA had very trivial impact on framerate in ATI Radeon cards?

My first graphics card (not counting the S3 ViRGE) was a TNT2 Ultra. Faster than a lot of the first offerings that came before it.

We now have graphics cards (in 4-way SLI) that are one thousand times faster (153 Gtexels/s vs. 166 Mtexels/s). Cripes!

I just skimmed the review but was their any mention of nVidia's wanky multi-monitor NON support in SLi? Is it still present? I remember being really impressed with ATi's CF + Multi Monitor support features.

yup, crazy-land is a fairly accurate description of where you would have to be, if you bought any of this stuff.

Another set of nVidia benchmarks and I'm still glad I bought my 8800GTX.

Hmm, where's the benchmark for the 8800GTS 512 in Crysis? Just for relative performance to the 9800GTX. Probably not to hot anyway, I'll just knock a frame from the 9800GTX's score.

Speaking of Crysis, how badly did they write the code? There must be something horribly wrong with the source code for it to remain a slideshow, even with all this firepower.

To prove your hunch about the Crysis memory limitation, how about testing some slower 1GB cards, the 1GB version of the 9600GT, 8800GT, 3870, or even a 2900XT?

Hey Wasson

This is great review, but there's a minute point that I'd be curious to have appended to the conclusion. The G92 is obviously the best GPU value these days, but are the 9x versions of it generally the best price/performance iteration of it? I'd be curious to hear whether you think that the 9800 or 9600 cards are a better bang/buck than the G92 based 8800GTS? A quick look at NCIX (I'm in Canada, so these are CDN prices) shows 9600GT at $170, 8800GT at ~$220, 8800GTS at ~$260, and 9800GTX at $340. To my mind, while that looks good for 9600GT, and the 8800's, that seems to make 9800 GTX, which is almost $100 more for a paltry few more FPS, a sad deal. One must remember that the 9x cards have no new features over the 88 cards Whats your opinion on that?

the 9800 gtx is the weak gtx ever . the 9600 is the best card from 9 series.
I'm hope the 4000 seris is better and cheaper and 45nm :D

that's a pretty awesome review. the product is of course about as underwhelming as it possibly could have been, but the review was great.

If they're going to call it the 9800GTX the least they could have done is include 1gb of RAM, SOMETHING to differentiate it from the 8800GTS 512.

well thanks nvidia for the big yawn . . .

When can we see some results with SLI and the 790i chipset? It's got a couple of features designed precisely to address SLI scaling issues. I'm not knocking the 780i, just saying that the _real_ SLI performance story should be on the 790i. That direct GPU-to-GPU data transfer should make a real difference at the highest resolutions. And if it doesn't, I'd like to know ...

Are the boards just not stable enough yet?

Great review TR. Not only fun to read, but now with very nice hardware porn pics :)

Conclusion: 9600GT SLI is the way to go!

Excellent review.

It still points out the sheer absurdity of SLI/CF solutions. They only make somewhat sense at uber-high resolutions that require 30" LCD monitors. (or if you managed to find a quality 22" CRT). The more important thing is that there is hardly anything on the PC worth playing that truly needs their power. I am not going to into to the difficulties to get stable and efficient drivers under these solutions.

The laws of diminishing returns are so darn painful. Why spend over $499 to over a grand to get a 20-30% gain over single-card solutions? It makes the high-end PS3 and 360 Elite look mighty attractive.

I am keeping a hold onto my aging X1900XT until there is something that utter blows it out of the water without requiring multi-card solutions.

My passively cooled XFX GeForce 7950 GT still runs games well for me. Someone call me when Nvidia releases something that is truly ground breaking, such a a passively cooled card that matches the performance of this generation's graphics cards, supports native double precision arithmetic, sips power at idle like my Dell laptop's GeForce 7900 GS does and has good driver support on all platforms like how things were before Vista. When they do all of this, I will be interested.

The picture at the top of page 2 is ludicrous in so many ways...

And the memory footprint on 32-bit is equally hilarious. And the Crysis numbers, oh god, that's just sad.

Great writeup guys, thanks!

It's good to see my 2X 8800GT still does the job..

The more I read about benchmarking Crysis with these insane GPU & CPU combo's and still seeing this horrible performance, the more I am inclined to think that it's awful and sloppy code.

I mean come on, Crysis looks as great as many current titles graphically and that most of these titles run perfectly well with a single midrange card (8800GT, 9600GT) and run high resolutions with good framerates (Bioshock, CoD4,etc) however Crysis cannot even break 40FPS with quad SLI and $1K+ video setups is just pathetic.

No wonder that Intel could not even run the demo of FC2 at a decent frame rate with the best hardware money can buy at GDC. No wonder why there is no 360 port of this game.

Not happy nvidia/amd-ati.

I want 20 x SLI.

Damn YOU!

Thx for Including Quake Wars to your benchmarks.
I wonder if you have enabled multicpu core support in your ETQW benchmarks?
cvar command:
seta r_useThreadedRenderer "2"

ETQW Community is not the biggest but going strong:
http://community.enemyterritory.com/forums/

http://community.enemyterritory.com/forums/showthread.php?t=24609

Please, uh, hose it:

http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=619144

Thanks.

I think.

Oh, also, please go here...

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14524

..and click the 'digg' button at the top of the page. Thanks.

I would like to know what your energy bill is like when you run these tests? :D