When scaling from one GPU to two doesn't necessarily result in doubling the performance as we've seen in countless SLI and CrossFire articles. But what happens when you add a third GPU to the mix? That is what we're going to find out today by putting three GeForce 9800 GTX cards together. If you remember, we weren't too impressed by the GeForce 9800 GTX as a single card but it won us over in SLI mode. With one more GeForce 9800 GTX, we'll find out how the current crop of games scale. We're not comparing the GeForce 9800 GTX 3-Way SLI to other competing products, though we will compared the amount of cards with each other to see the scaling and the performance impact. - t-break

NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX 3-Way SLI Gaming Review

Of course to be able to use three NVIDIA based graphics cards in a 3-Way SLI config you will need to have a mainboard supporting this, which means you will need to go for at least a nForce 680i chipset. Of course the best way to go is to opt for the newest technology for the 3-Way SLI and that would be the nForce 790i chipset, which is a more enhanced version of the nForce 780i. And as you will now have a lot of graphical rendering power also the central processing will need to be up to speed, and that means you can only go for a decent quad core Intel processor which is clocked at over 3.0GHz and even more.

So there you have it, at the resolutions that we tested these games under, Triple SLI does not really bring much to the table. Out of the eight games, there was noticeable like 20% or higher difference in four of these like Company of Heroes, Crysis and Lost Planet. The other games didn't show that big of an improvement. Also worth noting is that Crysis did not play well with certain anti-aliasing levels and Triple SLI. For the same reason Company of Heroes wasn't too happy either. However, these are expected driver issues that will be solved sooner or later. At least that is how it will come as NVIDIA is working hard towards this feature.

And so at the moment, the Triple SLI gaming config might only be worth for people with displays capable of extremely high resolutions, and we're talking about those extreme widescreen 30" LCD's here. For everyone else including a high-end gamer that play at lower widescreen, your standard dual card SLI is more than capable and the scaling of Triple SLI is not required.