![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Thursday , April 28, 2011
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
NVIDIA GeForce 3-Way SLI and Radeon Tri-Fire Review
We've seen what a Radeon HD 6990 can do when paired with a Radeon HD 6970 for "Tri-Fire" performance. Now it is time to find out what three NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 video cards in 3-Way SLI game like in comparison. We will look at A2A performance comparisons and discuss which setup offers the best gameplay experience.
Power Testing
We tested the power utilization at the wall of the entire system without a video card, and with each video card at idle and full load. For full load power and temperature testing we used real gaming, in this case Battlefield: Bad Company 2. The power supply used in testing is a PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 1200W. Our system is very lean with only one optical drive and one hard drive being powered. Total system wattage at idle without video card is 190W.
Out of all the comparisons here, GeForce GTX 580 3-Way SLI idled the highest at 308 system Watts. Second to that was AMD Tri-Fire and then 2-Way SLI was the best at idle Wattage. However, the landscape really changed at full-load.
GeForce GTX 580 3-Way SLI peaked at a whopping 1016 system Watts during our gaming! That is a lot of power folks, and is approaching on the limits of this PSU at 1200 Watts, and this is just a lean system with no frills. Suffice it to say, that's a lot of power just to equal the same performance as AMD Tri-Fire in our testing.
Performance Summary
The performance we experienced is a bit unexpected. We figured that GeForce GTX 580 3-Way SLI would compete much stronger with and in some comparisons dominate AMD Radeon HD 6990/6970 CrossFireX "Tri-Fire" performance, especially when you consider that three GeForce GTX 580 video cards cost between $475-$555 more than our Tri-Fire configuration. With that kind of cost difference, GTX 580 3-Way SLI needed to eclipse AMD Tri-Fire gaming performance, but 3-Way SLI did not.
In fact, the best case was that GTX 580 3-Way SLI matched Radeon Tri-Fire performance. In none of these games did the average framerate of GTX 580 3-Way SLI exceed that of AMD Radeon HD 6990/6970 CrossFireX. This is bad news for the GTX 580 3-Way SLI folks, considering the Radeon HD 6990 wasn't even running in its OC performance mode. On top of that, three separate Radeon HD 6970 video cards offering triple-GPU performance will be faster still since those have faster core clock speeds and faster RAM speed than what we tested here.
We have given every advantage to the GeForce GTX 580 3-Way SLI configuration in this evaluation, and yet it still can't compete. We are testing with the "slowest" Radeon 6990/6970 Tri-Fire configuration possible in this $1000 price range, and GTX 580 3-Way SLI just can't touch it.
The Bottom Line
AMD Radeon Tri-Fire is giving you the same or better performance than GTX 580 3-Way SLI for $500 and 200 watts less. You get both a money savings and a power savings using Radeon 6990/6970 Tri-Fire instead of GeForce GTX 580 3-Way SLI.
It just makes no sense to build a GTX 580 3-Way SLI currently. AMD Radeon 6990/6970 Tri-Fire is better in terms of value, efficiency, and gaming performance than GTX 580 3-Way SLI. If you want to utilize that performance, the 2GB of RAM per GPU on the Radeon HD 6970 will allow you to do this and provide a noticeable gameplay experience and visual improvement over GTX 580 3-Way SLI. No other conclusion can be made at this point, AMD Radeon HD 6970 Tri-Fire is a tremendous value compared to GTX 580 3-Way SLI, and Tri-Fire is the better choice for multi-display gaming.
Given NVDIA's history of excellent SLI scaling, we expected to see the GeForce GTX 580 3-Way SLI dominating AMD Radeon Tri-Fire. Instead, this review has only further reinforced what an incredible value AMD's current generation video cards really are.
