Nvidia GTX295 Quad SLI

Conclusion

To say I was in awe at the benchmark results is an understatement. Although the scaling was nothing groundbreaking, it was still very good and made a significant impact on the results. The setup simply tore through everything we threw at it and while I didn’t expect the setup to struggle, I was impressed with the ease of which it played every game, even with the settings maxed out.

As with all power, there should come responsibility. If you intend on buying this setup but running it in tandem with  a CPU at its stock clocked speed then don’t. Two cards would be a complete waste of money for such a system, even the range topping i7 965 chips do not supply adequate CPU cycles to ‘feed’ the cards,. The benefits of a Quad SLI setup only begin to show when CPU clockspeed is increased dramatically over stock.

I would also be aghast at anyone wishing to purchase and run a setup such as this with anything less than a 24″ monitor. In the majority of benchmarks we ran, the cards were quite obviously CPU limited at lower resolutions. At times even 1900×1200 showed signs of being limited, so one might even suggest Quad SLI is only for the owners of 30″ panels. While I wouldn’t necessarily agree with that statement, I would say that if you intend on gaming at high resolutions and like to apply all the trimmings without worrying about trivial things such as frame rates and electricity bills then Quad SLI should certainly be on your shopping list. How you pay for the setup will depend on which bank will offer you a re-mortgage, such is the cost of ownership.

The Good
– Unparallelled performance
– Easy setup
– E-Peen glory

The Mediocre
– Noise might be an issue for some
– Power consumption certainly will be.

The Bad
– Even Members of OPEC will cringe at the price.

Thanks to Zotac and XFX  for providing the GTX295’s for todays review. Discuss in our forums.