Date:
Tuesday , February 01, 2005
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Gigabyte 3D1 GeForce 6600GT SLI

NVIDIA SLI on one video card? It is possible, and Gigabyte shows us how it’s done. See how the Gigabyte GeForce 6600 GT SLI stacks up to the competition and find out which is better performing -- a 6600 GT SLI solution, or a single GeForce 6800 GT.

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Compatibility:

According to Carol Chiou of Gigabyte, the Gigabyte 3D1 will only work in the Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI motherboard. This isn’t so much of a problem since the video card will only be sold in a bundle with the K8NXP-SLI motherboard at an MSRP of $550. However, this being [H]ardOCP, we just had to see what would happen if you installed it on another PCI-Express capable motherboard. We used two different motherboards and platforms to see what would happen.

Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe

The Asus A8N-SLI motherboard supports NVIDIA’s SLI and has two PCI-Express slots. This is our base platform for testing SLI performance. We just had to see what would happen when we plugged the Gigabyte 3D1 into the A8N.

With the SLI motherboard connector on “Normal Mode” and the BIOS SLI option selected to “Normal,” surprisingly, it booted right up with the Gigabyte 3D1 video card! Next, we performed a clean OS install. With the BIOS SLI option in “Normal” mode, we installed the ForceWare 67.03 drivers. The drivers detected a single GeForce 6600 GT. We rebooted, and found that in “Normal” mode, the motherboard and drivers see the video card as a single GeForce 6600 GT. We were able to play 3D games with no problems and experienced single 6600 GT performance. Note that this setup was completely stable. However, you don’t buy this card to just play with one GPU; you want both GPUs going in SLI. Therefore, we rebooted and set the BIOS to “SLI mode.”

The computer restarted with no problems and came right back into Windows. Windows detected the second 6600 GT GPU as a second device A balloon pop up appeared and said we can now enable SLI mode! We clicked the balloon, came to the driver SLI menu, and then hit the check box to enable SLI. We clicked apply and then Windows said that we must restart for changes to take effect.

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It was at this point that the corruption started. The machine restarted just fine, it POSTED, windows loaded, but right when Windows is supposed to drop you to the desktop, we got the corruption that you see above on the screen. Being the ever-persistent reviewers that we are, we performed a hard shutdown and turned power to the computer off. We then turned it back on and let it boot up. To our surprise and delight, Windows loaded up perfectly. We then went to check the driver control panel and lo and behold, it said SLI was enabled! With shock and glee on our faces, we enabled the SLI performance HUD so we could see if SLI was indeed working. We fired up DOOM 3, FarCry, and then Half Life 2, and with amazement, were playing these games in SLI on the Gigabyte 3D1 on the Asus A8N-SLI motherboard. We rebooted several more times to see if corruption would appear again, but it never did. We had a 100% completely stable gaming experience in SLI with the Gigabyte 3D1 on the Asus A8N-SLI motherboard after the initial hard reboot.

ABIT AA8 Duramax

As happy as we were, we weren’t satisfied with just leaving it at that. We had to try another motherboard -- a motherboard that does not natively support SLI at all. The ABIT AA8 Duramax is an Intel 925x-based motherboard with a PCI-Express x16 slot. We installed the Gigabyte 3D1 on this motherboard to see what would happen.

Sadly, it wouldn’t even POST with the video card installed. No initialization at all. Well, at least we tried…