For every single gamer out there, getting the most performance out of their video card is vital for a pleasant gaming experience. That is probably why the most expensive hardware component hiding inside the case is, more often than not, the graphics card. Obviously, not everyone can afford to put the same kind of money into it, so that's why both ATI and NVIDIA offer various models from low prices to ridiculously expensive cards. For those gamers that always want more out of their setup, pairing two cards is the only choice for absolute top of the line performance. This is exactly why both companies offer the possibility to combine the power of multiple cards, reaching higher performance. - Overclockers Club

XFX GeForce GTX 260 XXX Board SLI Gaming Review

As you probably are aware, NVIDIA's iteration of this feature is called SLI, which now stands for scalable link interface. Both cards are linked together using a bridge connected between them. Recently, we looked at the XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black edition and we were quite impressed by the performance it was able to deliver. And today, we are going over not only one, but two of XFX's slightly lower clocked XXX versions of the GeForce GTX 260. Where this one has its GT200 core clocked at 640MHz, just 26MHz shy of the praised Black edition, while the GDDR3 memory runs at the exact same 2300MHz effective clock speed.

The box, or should we say boxes, are pretty impressive to say the least. The huge GTX logo is really catchy with all the light rays being emitted from it along with some kind of creature in the back keeping a close look at you. The model name is clearly labeled right under it, although it doesn't say anything about having 216 cores like the cards from a short while back since all the current cards ship with the beefier core. Of course, this card supports SLI technology in both dual and triple card configurations. Also bundled with it is a very popular game, Call of Duty 4. Hopefully the latest iteration of the famous game series.

This GeForce GTX 260 card is kept cool, if that is possible at all, by NVIDIA's reference design. Even though this an overclocked version, there is absolutely no way to differentiate it from other models since the sticker covering the cooler is the same. Perhaps a little customization would have been nice to see, although it's not like you have to stare at them all day long, plus it still looks pretty good. The whole card is covered by the housing from top to bottom, which keeps it safe from any damage that could occur. On the front side, it has a pair of dual link DVI outputs as well as a video port, which can be converted if needed.

This pair of GeForce GTX 260's coming from XFX is nothing short of impressive. They feature an awesome looking heatsink and the bundle it comes with is all you need to get started. This is also the latest version of the GeForce GTX 260, equipped with 216 processing cores and each of those are clocked to 640MHz. We were able to take the cores to 732MHz, which is pretty decent headroom. Obviously, the GeForce GTX 260 is a very good performer, but as you have seen, a pair of them in SLI performs even better. The twins won every single benchmark except for 3DMark06 which has always performed better on ATI video cards.

Saying it destroyed every other card wouldn't be entirely true though. At the low resolutions performance wasn't that far above other competing cards and scaling was often poor, especially at stock settings. However, once we started benching at widescreen resolutions and up, while the other cards performance started dipping, this setup stayed up there. They always delivered very playable frame rates and that's to be expected considering the money this setup will take out of your pockets. And a pair of those will likely cost a bit less than a Radeon HD 4870 X2 and provide a performance increase up to ten percent in most games.

The price is somewhat of an issue, although if you are even considering buying more than one video card, money is most likely not a huge problem. Graphics cards are the hottest running component in a modern enthusiast computer so when you put two of them side by side things tend to get hot. Something that has always been an issue with multiple cards working together is scaling. Most of us are aware that adding a second card won't double performance for various reasons, but it also won't necessarily just increase it by a steady percentage. Overall, that was really an awesome pair of cards to have on our test bench.

If you can afford it, this is definitely a great choice as far as performance goes. You should be aware that this kind of graphics processing power needs a very powerful processor to be able to show off all it has under the hood. Gaming at high resolution with all the eye candy turned on was a tremendously pleasant experience that simply can't be offered by a single GPU.