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Conclusion

SLI came, saw and won, and we could leave it at that. In most benchmarks, at least at high resolution and AA & AF turned on, we saw a huge increase in performance over the single card configuration using the same hardware. Of particular relevance in this case is that there is no need to spend an un-sum of money on high end graphics cards that are not available anyway. Any pair of GF 6600 GTs pretty much blows away any single card – within the limitations outlined in the article – for as little as $370,- which is the combined price tag of two eVGA cards at the lowest price reseller.

In some ways, it appears almost preferable to stick with the GF 6600 GT solution, moving on to e.g. 6800 GTs or further will inevitably stress the system limitations more without adding much in terms of graphics performance.

As always, there are a number of disclaimers. Not all games will work with SLI, the ones we tried did but it depended on the resolution and quality settings whether the improvements were noticeable. Other games appear to still lack proper driver support, that is, there is no valid profile established for them yet. A good overview of this issue can be found in a recent [H]ardOCP article but keep in mind that it may require as little as a patch to get things taking off in SLI mode.

One aspect I tried to focus on a bit was the difference between AFR and SFR and the lack of scaling of SFR even in situations where a limited amount of on-board frame buffer would suggest an advantage of SFR at least at higher resoliutions. I believe that FarCry is worth revisiting by nVidia and maybe a change of the respective profile is in order.

Otherwise, to make this short and sweet, SLI has swept us away, there were no stability issues other than those caused by incompatible monitors, the split bandwidth is still more than redundant, and the complexity of the setup can further be reduced. That is, at least in the current system architecture, there appears to be no reason to even feature a redirector card with the option of running a single PCIe slot with 16 lanes. As long as the available memory bandwidth in the system stays below some 10-12 GB/sec in streaming mode, all a 16 lane architecture can provide is redundancy at the expense of user friendliness. In other words, our recommendation is to simply split the lanes without even offering any switch possibilities. That will reduce the cost of the mainboards and potential complications in the setup along with commitment to customer support and in the long run, increase the reliability of the system.

eVGA GeForce 6600GT:

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