Date:
Tuesday , February 17, 2009
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
Google +1

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 Quad SLI

We take a close look at gameplay performance with the GeForce GTX 295 Quad SLI and compare it to Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossFireX. The results may surprise you and make you question whether Quad SLI or CrossFireX are worth investing in for gaming at this time. You will want to see what happened with GTA4.

continued...

System Test Setup

We will be using an EVGA 790i Ultra SLI motherboard, an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 (Overclocked to 3.66GHz), and 4GB of Corsair CM3X1024-1800CD Dominator DDR3. We will also be using an ASUS P5E3 Premium X48 for Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossFireX.

While it might be a bit “overkill,” we use the 3.6GHz overclocked quad-core processor in an attempt to keep from putting our evaluation into a position of being CPU limited. Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the 3.6GHz processor seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.

Article Image

Article Image

If you have everything properly setup you will see four GeForce GTX 295’s displayed in GPUz.

Evaluation Method

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and “eye candy” graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home. Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing in bar graph form with minimum, maximum, and average framerates.