Introduction

We have had a look at the 320MB nVidia GeForce 8800GTS graphic card offering a few times here at TweakTown in the past - we have looked at it in its stock form, overclocked and in SLI. It's a fantastic card and doesn't disappoint but in our first article we mainly focused on how it compared against the 640MB in single card configuration. Today we are going to be re-focusing on this situation but when the cards are used together in SLI mode.

With in excess of 1.2GB of memory on offer when the 640MB cards are enabled in SLI mode, you have to wonder are we simply at a point of overkill. Are the 640MB cards for non-SLI and the 320MB cards for SLI? These are some of the questions we hope to answer today.

While some companies have pulled the 640MB card from production, there are still a large number of companies offering them till this day. We almost had everything we needed for the article originally, with a couple 320MB cards from MSI in hand and a single 640MB we were close but not close enough. With an email or two later to MSI, a second 640MB arrived on our door step and we had only just one single mission for it - test it in SLI with our originally 640MB from MSI and see if moving to SLI dual graphics technology is actually worth it or not.

We won't be going into any detail on the cards as we have seen what they are capable of more than a few times now (here and here); this is purely a performance analysis and we won't be wasting anytime messing around with the usual particulars.

So we will have a quick look at our test system setup and get stuck straight into the benchmarks results from the different configurations.