XFX 8600GT XXX Edition + EVGA 8600GT Superclocked SLI

Here's a great review on how two different 8600Gt cards can be setup in SLI mode..

The video card market is dominated by news of the high-end video cards that range in price of $400 USD and above. Those cards are the highest performing, most feature-rich cards in the industry, allowing the end-user to play games with high fidelity in graphics and with Anti-Aliasing enabled. The average end-user doesn’t have $300-600 to spend on a video card, and the video card companies (AMD and NVIDIA) sell many more $200 cards than they do $300+ cards.

NVIDIA launched their 8800GTX card in early November of 2006. This card was the first on the market to fully support DirectX 10 graphics features like Pixel Shader 4.0, Geometry Shaders and was a huge success for the company, selling over 400,000 in the first quarter of sales alone. The MSRP of that card ranged above $500 and it is still the most expensive, feature-rich highest performing card on the market. Today NVIDIA is bringing the features of the 8800 series to the mainstream with three new consumer cards, the 8600GTS for the $199-249 price range, the 8600GT for the $149 price range and the 8500GT for the $99 price range.

EVGA and XFX are two of NVIDIA’s biggest partners in terms of retail video card sales in the United States. They manufacture video cards based upon NVIDIA chips exclusively, meaning that they don’t have any ATI or Ageia-based video cards. We have good relations with both companies and today I’m going to review two 8600GT cards, one from XFX, and one from EVGA with some SLI testing thrown in for good measure.
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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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The Invincibles: GeForce 8800 GTX Roundup

Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX retain the position of the world’s highest performing graphics adapter. Today we are going to talk about four models of this solution from Asustek Computer, Foxconn, OCZ Technology and XFX and find out what their appealing features are for the hardcore users. Read our new VGA roundup now!
November 2006 Nvidia announced its landmark graphics processor G80 that featured a unified architecture and support of Shader Model 4.0 and next-generation DirectX. The new chip turned out to be very complex, incorporating an unprecedented 681 million transistors. The analog section and TMDS transmitters were moved into a separate chip. The G80 processor became the foundation of the GeForce 8800 graphics card series led by the flagship GeForce 8800 GTX.
In 14 tests out of a total of 23 we used in our review the GeForce 8800 GTX was faster than dual-GPU SLI and CrossFire subsystems based on the fastest graphics cards from the older generation and even faster than a GeForce 7950 Quad SLI system Nvidia had expected so much from.
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Multi GPU Roundup: Quad SLI, SLI and Crossfire - from 24.09.2006

Little more than two years have passed since NVDIA first introduced their SLI technology. Short for Scalable Link Interface, SLI is the first solution to be able to connect two PCI-Express video cards based on the same GPU in a way that they will operate parallel to each other. This type of approach allows, at least on paper, to have an increase in performance of up to double what you would normally have with a single video card. In the first months of SLI’s release, it potential was limited by driver problems and other software errors.
However, forwarding two years into the future and with the release of several new driver versions from NVIDIA, SLI technology has really matured as a whole. Stability has been greatly improved and support has been added to an increasing list of games. SLI support has also been made more accessible to the general public with the release of average and entry level video cards that support the technology. Currently, SLI will even be made available on NVIDIA’s most budget level class of GeForce 7 video cards, the 7100 GS, thus making it a solution that is affordable and available to a vast amount of computer users.
At this moment, SLI and Crossfire technologies can be considered the first full phase of maturity for a broader category: multiple GPUs. The next phase is for more than two video cards being linked up to each other in an effort to, yet again, increase performance. As NVIDIA was first to reach the market with a dual video card solution, they have yet again been able to beat ATI in announcing a solution that utilizes more than two GPUs. The technology is, none other than, Quad SLI (the name isn’t very original). Quad SLI has four GPUs operating parallel to each other, theoretically doubling the performance in respect to an SLI setup.

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This here is a great link to view how much performance can you gain by building a SLI rig. Great link so you must check it out.

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XFX GeForce 7600GT Fatal1ty 650MHz in SLI mode

As we draw close to the launch of the new GeForce 8600 and 8500 series from nVidia next week, we will likely see users getting rid of their current mid-range graphics cards and upgrading. When you got your 7600GT, you said to yourself, “I will get a second one eventually for SLI, when I can afford it”. Well, this might be the perfect time to pick up some very capable DX9 graphics cards with a reduced price tag to make way for the new upcoming models.
We have with us today the GeForce 7600GT Fatal1ty from XFX (the version clocked at 650MHz core as opposed to the cheaper 560MHz) which is a bit fancier when compared to our standard run of the mill 7600GT. We’re going to have a look at exactly what the cards are capable of when running in SLI but also by itself.

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ASUS EN8600 GTS Comes Bundled with S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadows of Chernobyl

The new ASUS EN8600GTS/HTDP/256M is a high-end graphics card that will be released and bundled with the much anticipated first person shooter game S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadows of Chernobyl. Equipped with 256MB of DDR3 memory and able to support NVIDIA´s SLI™ technology, the EN8600GTS is designed with the gamer´s graphics expectations in mind. With such high-end specifications, this graphics card has earned the accolade of being the official global bundle partner of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. In line with this, ASUS´s G1 gaming series notebook – testament to its gaming-oriented design, also features in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R game itself.
The ASUS EN8600GTS utilizes NVIDIA´s unified architecture with GigaThread™ technology to deliver the finest graphics and visual special effects. With full support for NVIDIA SLI™ technology and Microsoft DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0, this graphics card will make use of the graphical enhancements from Microsoft® Windows Vista™ to enable stunning and complex special effects.

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Set of great articles on SLI from Tech-hounds..

Hi people
I've just found new tech website with tons of information about SLI. I don't have the time to make individual posts about every single article, so this is all-together article on SLI topic. One of the most valuable articles I have ever read on this topic.
Hopefully you'll like it, I know I did.

Revisiting SLI
Admittedly, we are skeptical of new technologies and products. After all, we think a healthy dose of skepticism is good since that means we reserve judgment until we saw proof to the contrary. When we first looked at what multi rendering has to offer with SLI, we were dismayed to say the least. From our experience, SLI doesn't always make good on its promise of performance. But at least, SLI have made good on the promise of quality, every time with every game

Crossfire: ATI's Answer to SLI - Part 2
Both Crossfire and SLI took some news time the past weeks with NVIDIA and ATI making the annoucement of supporting Havok FX physics. NVIDIA was the first to announce their support, back at E3 and ATI has followed suit in Computex. In general we think this is a good thing, particularly with SLI. This means if you don't experience a performance increase with a Havok FX enabled game in SLI, you can either use SLI to have SLI AA or physics.

Crossfire: ATI's Answer to SLI - Part 1
It's been a long time coming, but we finally decided to give in and test a Crossfire setup. For those of you out of the loop, Crossfire is ATI's take on the multi rendering solution, very much like NVIDIA's SLI. We were a little bit skeptical of multi rendering solutions in general, more so after looking at what SLI has to offer.

SLI: Myth and Reality - Part 2
Last week, we took a quick look at what NVIDIA's SLI has to offer. In that article, we concluded that while SLI does work, you should not expect tremendous gains in frame rates. In average, SLI can only offer around 30 % increase, occurring mostly when AA and AF are enabled. So, getting a single faster card is always better than putting two slow cards in an SLI setup.

SLI: Myth and Reality
Several weeks after the release of the GeForce 6 series, NVIDIA announced the rebirth of SLI. For the uninitiated, the moniker stands for Scalable Link Interface (and not Scan Line Interleaving from the ol' 3dfx days). The concept of SLI is pretty simple - instead of using a single card, you use two cards to render one screen by dividing the screen into two parts. If that's not possible, the two cards can take turns rendering the screen, ie. the first card renders all odd frames and the second card renders even frames. An intriguing idea and early test does show some promise. However, as most reviewers found out (later), SLI was anything but simple.

Ask Dan: Two 7950s or one 8800?

I'm in the process of buying a new computer, and I have come to a crossroad with video cards. I cannot determine if I am better off getting 2 Leadtek PX7950GT 512mb cards and running in SLI or getting 1 nVidia 8800GTX 768mb card.
What would your recommendation be? Will I get greater performance in games running 2 cards? Or is it better to just get one top-end card?
Jason

Fortunately, the rat's nest that is video card comparisons has become much simpler these days, which makes it very easy for me to answer your question. No, just kidding. It's as bad as it ever was, if not worse. Fortunately, it is possible to convey some vague idea of the current state of play without presenting you with 108 graphs of benchmarks from different games at multiple resolutions and with and without different levels of anti-aliasing.
There's no real-world situation I'm aware of in which a single GeForce 8800 GTX will be slower than a pair of GeForce 7950 GTs
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CrossFire and SLI dongle-less / bridgeless performance analysis

Multi-GPU rendering in games. Ah, truly a geek's dream come true; to be able to drop in an extra graphics card and double the performance of a game, or keep the lovely performance and up the resolution and IQ a couple of notches. But the two consumer multi-GPU implementations - SLI and CrossFire - aren't without their caveats, right?
Let think up a few drawbacks you might have on your mind. There's price, drivers, game compatibility, platform issues, power requirements, the setup and more. Oh, what a minefield... except it's not quite that bad and it's continually getting better.
We could wax lyrical about how yes, some single cards cost and perform the same as two cards in dual-GPU mode, but that with two cards there's the upgrade path of buying one now and another later... or we could talk about how game support is constantly being tweaked with every driver release. In fact, we could rattle on for hours about it, especially with assistance of a Hoegaarden or two.

Bridgeless and dongle-less multi-GPU rendering isn't exactly new. We've seen it on lower-end SLI and CrossFire solutions, but now it's starting to rear its head higher up the product ranges, where the lack of a dedicated inter-card link might have a bigger impact. Shall we see if it does?

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GEFORCE 8950 GX 2 AND GEFORCE 8800 ULTRA

The passed exhibition ceBIT 2007 many where assured that in the following block NVIDIA will release video card geForce 8950 GX2 and GeForce 8800 Ultra. It is assumed that they will be announced on 17 April; however, associates with the reference to NVIDIA briefing told that about the accessibility Of geForce 8800 Ultra will be possible to speak only during May. NVIDIA is assured that the performance of this video card will be sufficient to complete with Radeon x2900 XTX. Associate also speaks about the possibility of appearance for geForce 8800 Ultra during May; however, it called the ultra high price on the order of $999. Let us note that we have more optimistic data about price and characteristics of the new high end chip from NVIDIA…
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High-End Quadro FX 5500 and 4600

NVIDIA has recently released a series of high-end Quadro FX workstation graphics cards. CGSociety was loaned a series of cards from a local supplier, LeadTek, and we will focus on the recently announced Quadro FX 4600. The new Quadro FX products Quadro FX 4600 and the 5600 are based upon the G80GL GPU and are aimed at high-end applications.

The NVIDIA Quadro products are sold at a price premium compared to their consumer-oriented GeForce products. According to NVIDIA, the Quadro FX range are ISV certified with the leading professional applications, support commitment of three years from release, guaranteed availability for 18 months from release, Quadro memory management optimization, fast pixel read-back performance, and additional workstation-specific OpenGL acceleration support.

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INQ takes a dive and finds Black Pearls

BLACK PEARL IS the peak of EVGA graphics products and the product portfolio just expanded with water-cooled motherboards as well.
We heard about the process of selection for Black Pearl graphics cards and motherboards, so we decided to pay a visit to the European arm of EVGA's operation, in Grafelfing bei Muenchen. As it goes in Germany, this small city is reachable via a highway with no speed limit, even though the German government is thinking of dulling down with more and more speed restrictions.

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Overclocked XFX & Foxconn GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS Review

Preceding the launch of the GeForce 8800 series, NVIDIA was having great trouble with “hard launching” its products. For many of its new graphics products the company simply ended up with humble “paper launches”—a launch in which there is no actual hardware available for sale. A number of factors contributed to these troubled launches. NVIDIA might have been facing manufacturing and fabrication problems, translating to a limited of supply of hardware for manufacturers. Manufacturers might have also received actual working samples just a few days in advance of the launch, meaning they weren’t able to get a product out in time.

Whatever the reason behind the paper launches, NVIDIA placed a lot of hard work into making sure its GeForce 8800 launch didn’t suffer from the same problems. This time around, manufacturers received working product samples weeks in advance of the actual product launch. These extra few weeks provided ample time for manufacturers to assemble the cards and create a large stock, effectively taking them out of a position in which they would be rushing up to the last minute to get a finished product out the door. The 8800 launch also focused on having products shipped to retailers in large quantities before the actual launch. This move meant that consumers were able to purchase cards immediately on launch day. For the GeForce 8800, NVIDIA had a total of 15 retailers, online and offline, which were launch partners.

Just my quick comment is that this article is great! It directly compares Nvidia 7900GTX in SLI, 8800GTS/X SLI and also Ati's Crossfire. And you can clearly see from benchmarks who is the winner. More

Matchless Muscle: Overclocked 8800s

Nvidia has its rump comfortably nestled into the performance driver's seat with the only DX10-enabled graphics card available to consumers. One can argue, though, that there aren't any applications yet that can make use of the new API. However, the benefits of using a unified architecture with streaming processors for current applications clear.
There are many models on the market-maybe too many, some say. But regardless of whether or not you are a fan of sorting through the various models numbers and specifications, more choice for the consumer is a good thing. The only problem is the lack of competition in the performance space, which at least partially accounts for why prices remain at $600 for GTX models and $400 for GTS devices. Last month, we saw a 320-MB version of the GTS usher in a lower price of $300 for DX10 hardware.

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Inno3D iChiLL 7950GT Accelero S1M 256MiB

Inno3D has slowly been transforming itself from a homogeneous producer of NVIDIA-based graphics cards to a company that takes the enthusiast market seriously whilst still providing ye olde reference SKUs. The attempt to woo the enthusiast is best represented by the current iChiLL series, which adds custom cooling, pre-overclocked core and memory speeds, and the use of higher quality components. The end result is a range of premium graphics cards that offer something new. We first took a look at the company's iChiLL 7900GS ACS 6, and were suitably impressed by its impressive performance and attractive street price.

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BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTX OC2

The most important aspect of the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTX OC2 that sets it apart from the other GeForce 8800 GTX video cards is its clock speed. This video card comes from the factory with a 51 MHz overclock on the GPU, and 200 MHz overclock on the memory. The GPU on this video card is clocked at 626 MHz and the memory is clocked at 2.0 GHz. Subsequently the stream processors are also overclocked at 1.45 GHz versus 1.35 GHz on a standard 8800 GTX. The memory speed increase extends the memory bandwidth to 96 gigabytes per second, and the GPU overclock increases the texture fill rate to 40 billion pixels per second. Apart from the clock speeds, it appears to be identical to its older brother.
The BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTX OC2 has 768 MB of GDDR3 on board, running at 2.0 GHz on a 384-bit bus. The GPU has the same 128 streaming processors 6 ROP partitions that ever other GeForce 8800 GTX has. The GPU is manufactured on a 90nm process and comprises 681 million transistors. It fully supports HDCP and has two dual-link DVI-I connectors.
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GEFORCE 8XXX NEW DATA

We got some new data suggesting the final specs of the upcoming nVIDIA GeForce 8600 and 8500 series GPUs...As it seems GeForce 8600 GTS will NOT have 64 Stream Processors BUT only 32..The same is true for the GeForce 8600GT. On the other hand GeForce 8500GT has only 16 Stream Processor i.e 1 shader cluster as compared to 2 shader clusters in the8600 series and 8 shader clusters in the 8800GTX form..The cards will be available on April the 17.
Just my quick comment, what's important is that they will all support SLI technology!!
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Inno3D iChill 7300GT 256MB GDDR3 Graphics Card Review

Roughly around a month ago we reported that Inno3D plans to introduce separate overclocked cards’ range in their product line. Every other successful graphic card manufacturer has one and thus Inno3D brought one as well. Instead of just increasing the clocks and renaming the overclocked models, Inno3D opted for a different product line approach and brought ichill in to equation. Basically the concept behind ichill is a product line equipped with best of the best of graphic card cooling industry has to offer. Currently different models equipped with Zalman’s V series and Arctic Cooling’s Silencer and Accelero series have been introduced but it wouldn’t be long when they bring 8 series card with better cooling performance as well. Aside all the bells and whistles, the idea behind this is to offer cards pre-equipped with third party cooling devices saving customer's costs and efforts while reducing significant RMAs from overheating and so on. Inno3D, however, propogates the idea of producing cream of graphics cards through several enhancement over the lowend model, we'll see how that is achieved through this product here in this review.

We have a 7300GT model from the ichill to start with Inno3D, although this is our first Inno3D product review, we hope to work with them on future endeavors as well. The 7300GT here is equipped with arctic cooling’s Silencer 6. Inno3D offers 7300GT, 7600GT, 7600GST, 7900GS and 7950GT under ichill brand, we just happened to acquire the lowend model. However it is a fact that no one has reviewed iChill's lowend and mainstream series so its a good chance for those who want to see how these cards par up against your everyday off the shelf graphic card.

Just a quick comment - SLI is also supported on this card..

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MSI NX8800 GTX OC Liquid - compared to MSI 8800 GTX SLI and others..

Hi people

I've just saw on the internet one great review of MSI's NX8800 GTX OC Liquid card. The cool thing is that you can easily compare results to MSI 8800 GTX SLI cards which where review about two months ago... and also comparision with single 8800 GTX/S models, and Ati's X1950 XTX CrossFire

MSI uses a different water-cooling kit than the Thermaltake based one we saw on ASUS' AquaTank. We're not sure who makes this for MSI but basically, instead of taking up PCI slots, this one fits on the back of your chassis next to the CPU, where you generally install back fans. The good thing about it is that, unlike ASUS, you dont lose any PCI/PCI-E slots. However, the bad thing is that you need a chassis with enough room behind the CPU to install the large radiator/fan combo.

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Geforce 8800 GTS 320 SLI report

Already with our Geforce 8800 GTS 320 report we briefly began to cut the topic SLI, since it interested us whether 8800 GTS 320 SLI system would be worthwhile itself and whether one could make the lost memory performance compared with the large 8800 models again. Today the day of the truth is, today goes we to the thing on the reason. We have 2. Geforce 8800 GTS 320 from BFG to the order posed get, so that we can answer these questions.

Already before the acquisition of a diagram map we considered 8800 whether we 8800 GTX, 640 MT 8800 GTS or nevertheless the 320 MT a variant to purchase to be supposed itself. The reason for long considering are apart from the different initial costs also the future use of the map. 8800 GTX under-demanded and bored GHz dual core system would be obviously with the today's Games in a 3. On other side 2 pieces would cost 8800 GTS 320 the same. But a SLI pays the system in this variant at all? Questions over questions, which one can answer only by measurements.

This article is translated from Austrian webpage, so some systax errors in this text can be easily found.

This is the link to translated page (google)

And here's the original link