It would be pretty accurate to go on and say that the reception of Nvidia’s GTX 4xx series cards has been pretty mild so far. You have your standard allotment of die hard fanboys and loyalists who will buy up any and all hardware Nvidia puts out. And then you have more cautious consumers who really scrutinize the cost-to-benefit ratio of their potential purchases.
So let’s get to the point, with all the hubub about price and heat output aside, can (4) of the top end GTX 480′s conquer the planet?
In short: No. In fact, the test run by Hardware.info shows that a tri-SLI setup easily meets or beats the quad-SLI setup in most of the tests. On a sidenote, while the quad-SLI isn’t the fastest setup in town, it can easily double as a heater in those cold winter months with temps of 96 degrees Celsius!
The poor quad-SLI numbers could be a CPU bottleneck. But considering the test made use of a Core i7 980x, it’s pretty astonishing that the CPU was the source of the problem.
The moral of the story is: Hold off on that 4th GTX 480 for the time being. As we can see, something isn’t working right in quad-SLI to properly use all the resources available. I guess even the 980x isn’t powerful enough for such a GPU intense rig.
Any extreme gamers feeling like they’ve lost a bit of purpose in life?
> Hardware.info
