Don't you love the smell of napalm in the morning? Yeah, high-end stuff really makes our mind twisted. But really, once you have been playing around with an uber high-end system with quad GPU's that was actually working pretty well, these weird one-liners come to mind. You have probably already read about the GeForce GTX 295 graphics card, so a dual GPU based solution that kicks ass pretty intensely. Obviously you've read about the fact that these cards can be placed in SLI mode. Meaning you place two of these monsters in your PC, hook em up, strap 'em up and get even more game rendering performance. Suffice to say, we will be looking at GeForce GTX 295 in quad SLI mode. - Guru3D

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 Quad SLI Multi Core Review

As most of you know both ATI and NVIDIA have solutions on the market called CrossFire and SLI technology. Basically this will allow you to play your games with the help of multiple graphics processors. Within the confines of compatible mainboards you can increase the overall rendering performance of your games and thus increase your graphical gaming experience in several ways. Simply stated, you can run two or more graphics cards on selected motherboards, or better yet one or more graphics cards with multiple graphics cores on it. And quad SLI obviously simply means that there are four GPU's being utilized.

Alright you guys. We have been here before, and quad GPU gaming of course can hardly be justified whatsoever. In fact money wise it makes no sense, power consumption wise it's just bizarre and the platform you need to build and create is outlandishly expensive. Then there's the fact that with standard 2-way SLI or CrossFire and there are often small issues with the drivers, especially with new games. Now when you go for quad GPU gaming, these driver issues will become even more apparent. And really these multi GPU gaming technology is just something extremely complex for the PC to do and does require the best drivers.

Comparing to quad GPU testing, say two years ago, we're just going to say that we were surprised how few serious driver issues we actually had. Sure, there were some scaling issues and oddities here and there, but the GeForce GTX 295 for example worked like a charm in most titles. So overall the experience was pretty reliable, and well you would almost take the high frame rates for granted. With the game titles tested, we really didn't run into any bad atypical issues like crashes or anything. At most we noticed some scaling issues or a game that kicked back towards two GPU's, though quad SLI worked just fine.

So should you for whatever reason be drooling over and opting for quad GPU gaming, you should make sure you are on the Core i7 platform. It really makes a difference. The Core i7 processor and Intel X58 combo rocks hard and seems to be a truly excellent match to today's multi GPU based setups. But allow us to make it very clear though, a setup like tested today does not make any sense money or power consumption wise and neither will we try to defend that. Please weigh out the overall costs and disadvantages carefully before investing. But, we'll be damned if we try to deny it, it's a heck of a lot of fun.