Final Conclusion
What a day of wonders this has been. The resurrection of SLI technology is an exciting development for gamers everywhere, and it brings the whole bragging rights race to a whole new level, as well as providing an excellent excuse to update to a decent motherboard.
We were fortunate enough to test two systems provided by ASUS and MSI, both premier manufacturers, and we are suitably impressed with both the manufacturing quality of the products, and their single-card performance. The 6600GT’s came as a bit of a surprise, mostly because we underestimated the power of the GT suffix, but the 6800 showed it could easily hold its own when the chips were down, especially when taxed by more bandwidth intensive games such as Far Cry and Need for Speed Underground 2.
The power of a SLI system is awesome. Performance increases are impressive, thought they vary wildly from application to application, and the sheer geek coolness factor of having two GPUs processing in parallel is quite intoxicating.
That said, there still are quite a few issues that nVidia need to deal with, before the system is perfect. Games still need to have profiles coded into the driver in order to be supported, or SLI will simply not work. Support for new games is being added on a daily basis, but it would be nice to see transparent SLI support for all 3D-applications, not just games. If all OpenGL and DirectX calls could be automatically handled in SLI where available, performance would be boosted for more than just games.
There also are some interesting discrepancies in the two cards’ performance, which we can only explain with driver issues. Is the fact that the 6600GT would regularly outperform the 6800 at 1600x1200 with full AA and AF a side effect of the GT’s increased performance, or is it a driver issue? What are the causes of the performance dips that the 6600GTs exhibit at 1280x1024? Interesting issues which will be investigated further.
In spite of those few bumps in the road, technology has come a long way since the Voodoo 2 days, and seeing good old SLI dog alive and kicking is good.
Of the two systems, the performance crown has to be handed to the 6600GT SLI dual combo, which costs less than its 6800 counterpart, and performs just as well, and sometimes better, in all applications.
The Geforce 6800 currently makes more sense as a stand-alone purchase, rather than as part of a SLI system, though we’re sure that plenty of overclockers out there are just dying to prove us wrong with their tweaked-out 6600GTs.
At the end of the day, it’s all about costs and performance needs. While SLI is extremely exciting, and performs very well, users should carefully consider their needs for such power. What the benchmarks ultimately reveal is that unless one needs extremely high resolution gaming (and has a monitor for it), then a single card will still do admirably for most gamers, especially on PCI-Express systems. That said, I bet my SLI is bigger than yours.
Shopping time:
- Asus GeForce 6600 GT Video Card from $209.39.
- MSI GeForce 6800 NX6800-TD256E Video Card from $309.62
Page 01: Introduction
Page 02: The Packages
Page 03: The Benchmark Setup
Page 04: First Benchmark: CounterStrike Source
Page 05: Second Benchmark: Doom 3
Page 06: Third Benchmark: Far Cry
Page 07: Fourth Benchmark: Need for Speed Underground 2
Page 08: The Final Conclusion
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