XFX GF 8800GTX 575M SLI Review :: Setup and Installation

The new NVIDIA 8800GTX has two Bridge connectors for SLIing the 8800GTX. This hints at daisy chaining 8800 cards in more than the two cards that SLI currently support. The 8800GTX has the ability to be used as a physics processor like the Ageia PhysiX PPU. The likelihood is that NVIDIA will allow the use of the second bridge to connect a third card for Physics use.

Two SLI bridges

In any event, after I mounted the motherboard, I installed the QX6700 CPU along with an Intel reference heat sink that came with the CPU. The next step I installed the memory, hard disk drives, attached the CD-ROM and connected the power connections to the motherboard. The last step before booting the computer for the first time was inserting the XFX GeForce 8800GTXs attaching the power cables and the SLI bridge between the Golden Finger connectors.

The nForce 680i motherboard has three PCI Express x16 slots. To enable SLI mode you have to place the cards in slot 1 and 3. Slot 2 is reserved for the Physics card, and can also be used to install a lesser (less than x16) PCI Express device. Insert the bridge between two of the Golden Finger connectors and power up your system.

Two power connectors

Note the power requirements of two 8800GTX cards from NVIDIA's website indicates that a 8800GTX SLI Certified PSU is recommended. After a bit of a false start with this review I would have to agree with them. I tried our Ultra X-Finity PSU with two cards and it wasn't stable at all. I also tried a Enermax 850W PSU which should provide enough power but results were inconsistent. Last week, NVIDIA released a new BIOS to fix the problems with SLI and SATA RAID on the nForce 680i, but it was too late for me to retest everything, so I used the AMD FX-74 system instead to give a sense of perfromance on both the best Intel platform and the best AMD platform.