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XFX 7800GTX SLI Video Card Review :: SLI
One of the primary growth drivers of the video card market today is running multiple video cards on one system providing increased performance called SLI. NVIDIA introduced their multiple GPU solution, SLI (Scalable Link Interface) late last year. Today, they've sold well over 2 million SLI chipsets accounting for a sizable portion of their motherboard chipset market share. SLI has two modes of operation on the GEFORCE 7800GTX and 6xxx series of cards, AFR and SFR. AFR stands for Alternate Frame Rendering. In this mode, each video card renders a frame one after the other. SFR stands for Split Frame Rendering. In this mode, the two cards work together to render a single frame. AFR is useful when the card needs to render similar frames back to back. SFR is useful when parts of a frame are more graphics intensive than the next frame.  SLI Connector I attempted to use the 7800GTXs in SLI mode on the nForce4 for Intel SLI platform. Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful, despite trying 3 different motherboards, 3 different SLI bridges, and many hours of work. I believe the issue may have to do with a BIOS update, as the cards worked singly to specification and together. In 3DMark05, performance was the same with single or dual cards in SLI mode on the Intel platform. When using the AMD SLI platform, the results were far different. On the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe, performance with two cards was incredible. I was able to score over 11,000 in 3dmark05. While this benchmark is not an indication of performance in games, it was almost a 50% increase over single mode. In many cases, SLIed 7800GTXs are CPU limited, with increases in CPU clock speed giving higher performance increases than increases in GPU or memory clock speeds. As our test platform is Intel-based, it was hard for me to give performance in SLI mode when SLI didn't work properly. I decided to give our standard benchmarks and give a preview of performance with an AMD SLI platform. As I'm not about to change our tests in mid-stride, take the benchmarks separately, only as a preview of what SLI mode is to come. Once we are able to use Intel SLI with the 7800GTX, we will change to one platform. 7800GTX SLI Test Score Previews
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