This article was exciting to do for two reasons, the first was of course the fact that we were going to just see how powerful two of the fastest graphics cards on the market would perform when put together. This in total gave us four GPU's to play with across two cards and what this results in is a bucket load of power. The second reason was that we would finally get a chance to take SLI for a spin on the newly built testbed. It's really been ages since we've had the ability to test SLI on our main system. It was great that the Intel X58 closed that gap where we no longer need one mainboard for CrossFire and another for SLI technology. We wanted to see some quad SLI goodness, if not just for our readers. - TweakTown

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 Mix Quad SLI Board Review

We were fortunate enough to receive a GeForce GTX 295 sample card from both Gigabyte and Gainward, so with two boards in hand and our motherboard that supported SLI we were ready for some quad SLI action. The GeForce GTX 295 is impressive, but quad SLI can really show a card and driver faults. And well quad SLI was really less of a disaster than we thought it would be, considering just how early in the game it is. These Vantage scores are simply jaw dropping, we don't doubt for a second that come a few hours after the NDA lifting that the world records in 3DMark Vantage would have been broken almost instantly.

It also doesn't come as a surprise that games that don't take advantage of SLI don't see a boost in performance. It's a bit disappointing to see the source based Left 4 Dead get impacted negatively in a quad SLI configuration, but this game has been quite important for NVIDIA so we don't doubt that they're going to fix this issue. We weren't going to see gains of 100% really, it just simply never happens. We do however, see some good gains around the forty percent mark at the highest resolution. What this performance increase will let you do is start to turn anti-aliasing on with those 30inch displays under those newly games.

Now quad SLI isn't for everyone, purely from a cost perspective, but unless you have a monitor that is out putting those ultra widescreen resolutions it really is a complete waste of money with this resolution seeing the best gains. Considering full high definition is considered as 1080p and high definition gaming is simply something that the big two have been pushing lately, this setup could really be marketed as gaming beyond full high definition with it making 30inch gaming not only playable, but pleasurable. But quad SLI isn't perfect and it probably never will be, but we love it so much and accept it into our lives with open arms.

If you've got the money to afford it and the monitor that can take advantage of it, you won't be disappointed. And that is in the end the whole idea behind, only those who can afford it and do have quite a budget to spend will be able to enjoy some true high definition experience like never before.