8800 Ultra 3-Way SLi

3-way SLI gives gamers the flexibility to scale their graphics processing power with one, two, or three GeForce GPUs, depending on their desired price and system configuration.

 My experience with these cards has been exciting, not only does it perform they way I want, it looks bloody awesome as well.

 Vista only support for Tri SLi, that’s rite Microsoft has done it again, forcing me to use Vista which has to be the worst thing I have ever used, apart from my old toilet which I have replaced now. Games like crysis run better with Vista and DX10,  but i still hate the fact that i have to use this dreaded operating system, i miss XP so much. Also I hear that the recently released 9800GX2 in SLi Quad will have only Vista support as well.

 The drivers have been working well for me and i am currently using 174.53 with the inf mod and i haven’t had any problems. The only major problem i had is when I first installed the beasts, HEAT, the idle temp was around 75c and I didn’t even want to know what load temps would have been. I have found a cheap fix for this problem, by installing 2 120mm fans, one on each end of the 3 cards; this has made a massive difference dropping temps by about 20c. The reason for the high temps is that heat starts building up at the rear of the case and keeps getting worse and worse, if I was to touch the top rear of my case it felt like I could cook an egg on it. The fans exhaust the hot air out much better than the stock coolers, which by the way I have running at 100% at all times, extreme measures for such an extreme setup.

 The cards themselves are the 8800 Ultra XXX version from XFX which come shipped at 685@2300 straight out of the box.  They come in a matt black finish which i think could have been much nicer for such an expensive card. If you look at the new 9600gt it even looks like a nicer card with the nvidia Logo on the side.

 Futuremark with Vista is terrible, I managed 20,000 with my CPU running at 4.4 GHz which is ok considering the highest Vista 3D06 score was 24,000