Now for the last fifteen months the GeForce 8800 GTX has represented the most powerful graphics card that sane people were willing to buy. Sure, the GeForce 8800 Ultra is slightly faster but at a cost of over $600 it is reserved for those with gross amounts of disposable income. From the start, we were able to run SLI with the GTX and get incredible performance. Nowadays the GTX is starting to become long in the tooth as far as graphics cards go, 15 months is a very long time with nothing faster to come along. The latest games are certainly pushing even a pair of GTX's to unplayable levels at higher resolutions. Enter 3-Way SLI, a fully functional sorted extension of last years Quad SLI. - Legit Reviews

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX 3-Way SLI Version Review

It is not much of a secret that NVIDIA is prepping a new multi-GPU solution due out in just a few weeks so the announcement and successful launch of 3-Way SLI is no doubt a precursor to the Quad SLI solutions on the way. For those who do not remember, Quad SLI was plagued by the fact that for the money, it was a horrible investment. Well, it offered very marginal performance benefits in all but a select few applications and thus never adopted as the true high-end solution. Today we will be seeing how far the technology has come along as well as what it requires to get this level of performance, in the form of a 3-way solution.

Triple SLI looks great on paper, check that, it looks good on paper as long as you're not referring to the green sheets in your wallet. The requirements are an SLI certified mainboard with three 16x PCI Express slots, currently consists of either a nForce 680i, or a newer nForce 780i motherboard, which round out the Intel based offerings. Next up you will need three of the same video cards in either our beloved GeForce 8800 GTX or Ultra flavors. There is no support for the recently released G92 based GeForce 8800 GT, or GTS of any variety due to only one SLI bridge tab being available on these newer graphics cards.

This is quite a shame as the G92 based GeForce 8800 GT and GTS offer excellent performance at their respective price ranges, outperforming even the mighty Ultra in some situations. We suspect that the only reason the GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra are still around is to support Triple SLI, ensuring that NVIDIA makes top dollar from those looking for the top performance. The G92 based Triple SLI would be great for consumers in the end, as it would lower the power requirements and heat produced by the system, thus reducing not only purchase price but operation costs as well, and this also producing less heat all together.

So, NVIDIA's 3-Way SLI indeed works but at the price of entry, it had better. The problem however is that in this instance at least, it is based on technology that is approaching the end of its life. The GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra have all but been replaced by the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB and the GeForce 9 series cards have already started to launch. The Quad SLI launch of the GeForce 9800 GX2 is imminent and should undercut the cost of either Triple GTX's or Ultra's and perform on par or better. So really the only way this is going to be of benefit if you've already got an nForce 680i or higher and a pair of GeForce 8800 GTX's.

Heat and power consumption are two things that are of concern, the system pulled 380W at idle and over 700W in some of our gaming benchmarks. You'll also want to run this system in a large room as that much heat being dumped into the air is going to really raise the temperature. Again, these are minutiae to the sort of extreme gamer that would be looking at this type of solution. For the rest of us though, it's good news that multi-GPU development is going well as the upcoming generations of GPU's will be able to offer some lower heat and power consumption without sacrificing too much performance.