Test System Setup

Processor(s): Intel i7 920 @ 3.8GHz (190MHz x 20)

Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P (Supplied by Noctua)

Motherboard(s): GIGABYTE EX58-UD5 (Supplied by GIGABYTE)

Memory: 3 X 2GB OCZ Technology PC-12800 DDR-3 8-8-8-24 (OCZ3G1600LV6GK)

Hard Disk(s): Western Digital 300GB Velicorapter (Supplied by Western Digital)

Operating System: Windows Vista SP1 64-Bit

Drivers: Forceware 181.20

Looking at the screenshot below, the most important bit of information that we can pull out is the fact that all three GPUs are enabled as per the line at the bottom of the screen shot.

Above you can also see that we're using the stock clocks on the cards. Today we'll simply be looking at the performance of adding the extra cards across our Vista benchmarks. With everything said and done, let's get stuck into the benchmarks and see if Tri-SLI is working a bit better than how it's been in the past.

3DMark Vantage

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.0.1

Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com

Product Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmarkvantage/

Buy It Here

3DMark Vantage is the new industry standard PC gaming performance benchmark from Futuremark, newly designed for Windows Vista and DirectX10. It includes two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, and support for the latest hardware.

3DMark Vantage is based on a completely new rendering engine, developed specifically to take full advantage of DirectX10, the new graphics API from Microsoft.

It doesn't come as any real surprise that across the board we see good gains with the GTX 285 SLI setups. Adding a third card into the mix gives us a good boost in performance under the intensive Extreme preset.