MSI GeForce 8800GTS 320MB SLI Performance

It's been quite a while since we have looked at anything SLI related at TweakTown and for good reason. Until the nVidia nForce 680i platform arrived, we didn't see a huge need to move to an SLI platform. The move from our Socket 939 AMD system to the Intel Core 2 Duo setup was one of the best we have ever done and with so much interest in the new platform from Intel (which just supports Crossfire dual graphics) it was going to be some time before we moved to a new platform which supports SLI.

As the new abit IN9 32X-MAX Wi-Fi (based on nForce 680i chipset and reviewed here) arrived into our labs, I instantly claimed it as the base VGA test motherboard. It's a pity that the board didn't perform as well as we expected in our testing (when overclocked). With a weird combination of BIOS resets and changes we eventually got it running and it hasn't skipped a beat yet. No doubt we will make the move when a newer revision of the 680i comes out but for the time being it's suiting us just fine and running extremely well for our graphics card testing requirements.

What do we have today? We have a pair of GeForce 8800GTS 320MB GTS graphics cards from MSI. With the 640MB version already being discontinued, these cheaper edition cards are popping up all over the place and it was great to have a pair together in the labs. It's not a cheap upgrade at around $900 AUD (about $680 USD) for the pair of them but if you're looking for some serious 3D gaming performance, it could well do the trick.

We clearly felt that if we were going to test SLI 8800's, it had to be done properly - the Dell 30" LCD with its lovely 2560 x 1600 resolution was pulled out and SLI was tested in style. Let's not ramble on anymore and see exactly what we have here and if a pair of 8800GTS 320MB cards in SLI can do it for us.