Date:
Friday , June 23, 2006
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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NVIDIA SLI & ATI CrossFire - Experiences & Opinions

Brent Justice talks about real-world experiences with SLI, CrossFire, and Dell’s 30” LCD. This is a free form editorial that simply gives you our opinions about high-end gaming as we see it today.

Introduction:

We get to install, use, and abuse a lot of hardware here at [H]ardOCP. Different brands, different manufacturers, different models and many different types of components get tested under our roof. With such a large assortment of hardware that we use in real-world situations we gain in-depth experience using that hardware. For example with video cards we use them in a real world setup including unpacking it from the retail box, physically installing it in motherboards, installing drivers and software and finally using it for gaming for prolonged periods of time.

With all our experience using hardware and drivers we thought we’d give you some real-world feedback about those experiences. Recently we published our BFGTech GeForce 7950 GX2 evaluation. We spent literally over three weeks configuring and using an SLI platform and a CrossFire platform connected to a Dell 3007 WFP 30” LCD for gaming. Along the way not everything went as planned and there are positive and negative aspects we found in regards to each platform. In this editorial our goal is to simply talk about our experiences using this hardware and make some comparisons. We will dive into SLI, CrossFire, their associated driver sets, and Dell’s 3007 WFP 30” LCD display.

Installation Setup

Let’s start right at the beginning; installing SLI and CrossFire video card configurations. In our test setup we used the absolute best and latest platforms for each. (Editor’s note: We did start testing before the AMD socket AM2 launch so that platform was not included.) We had an ATI Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire Edition video card that we paired with an ATI Radeon X1900 XTX. You can read all about these models here. This was the best possible combination offered from ATI as far as dual GPUs go. We paired them on an ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe motherboard using the ATI Radeon Xpress 3200 chipset (RD580). This motherboard offers dual x16 PCI-Express slots. We had an AMD Athlon64 FX-60 and 2GB of RAM with the tightest timings possible making for one killer system setup.

For the fastest possible SLI platform we used an ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard with the nForce4 chipset and dual x16 PCI-Express support. We had two retail BFGTech GeForce 7900 GTX OC video cards in SLI as well as two GeForce 7950 GX2’s in SLI. You can read about the GeForce 7900 series here. The same RAM and CPU were used to make for the best possible systems.