GTX580 Tri vs GTX580 Quad Video

Loading min, not actual min. At the end the its .4 in favor of quad.

I would assume whatever cpu they used was a huge bottleneck.

Cpu bottleneck...even at 3 way, but not as much as quad.

Figure there is a minimal drop in pcie [email protected] x8x8x8x8 as well vs x16x8x8.

D:

Pretty positive 2 xeons at 4ghz arent bottlenecking those cards. Deff not 3 way sli..maybe 4 way slightly. That minimum can change drastically each time the benchmark is run depending on how each stage loads, which is why the 4 way sli has a lower minimum. The frames werent even synced together anyway.

Loading min would be when a benchmark like Heaven firsts loads it takes a moment for the information to pass from the ram/cpu to the gpu/vram. In that opening moment there is typically a "low" that occurs which is outside the normal low you would get had it not needed to load up.

TRI SLI would be good in situations where your wallet felt pain and you didn't need the extra card to begin with. Even if I had the money I probably wouldn't run quad SLI until after Ivy Bridge came out, it just takes a lot of cpu power to push all the information those gpus want.

Pretty sure he could have a 48 core setup if the benchmark doesn't use more than 1 thread it won't help.

It's all about the runs too, I can get the 60FPS in one run, and 45 in another at the same clocks, all about how it loads.