The benchmark you all been waiting for - MSI 8600GT in SLI mode!

Nvidia's latest G84 and G86 cards are doing the rounds on review sites at the moment, and because of this they are rather hard to come by. Fortunately, we have managed to get hold of a second 8600GT. Let's see what these bad boys can do in SLI.

Interestingly, the canted cooler proved problemamatic again when setting up SLI. We had the same memory clearance issues but the SLI bridge was also not quite able to fitted correctly due to one of the pins running through the fins sitting slightly too high on both cards. It all still worked correctly, but surprising that this was not noticed in testing.

Conclusion in short:
The performance gained from adding a second of these cards is clearly pretty impressive. These cards scale extremely well when moving to SLI from a single overclocked card. The 8800 series still retains the performance crown, but the 8600s together nip on the heels of the GTS 320s and completely dominate the x1950 series of cards from ATI/AMD.

The fact that SLI performance on these cards is so good means that those with small cases can have near 8800 performance without space problems, those who want DX10 support can get it relatively cheaply with a worthwhile upgrade solution of another card down the line and those who want near 8800 performance with a passive card can now do so.
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