GeForce GTX 295 In Quad-SLI

Test Settings

The biggest problem we’ve encountered when using high-end graphics solutions is that at the highest resolutions and settings, the cards cannot get data fast enough from the CPU and RAM to keep their graphics cores busy. In an effort to reduce this so-called “CPU bottleneck,” we overclocked our Core i7 processor to 4.00 GHz at a 200 MHz base clock.

Cooling an overclocked Core i7 CPU isn’t a task for lightweights, so we added Swiftech’s latest Apogee GTZ water block to the liquid-cooling kit we normally use for motherboard testing.

Feeding data quickly to the CPU are three 2.0 GB DDR3-1600 modules from Crucial. These particular samples are part of an upcoming High-End Triple-Channel shootout; watch for it in a few days.

Including 3-way SLI tests required a motherboard with proper slot spacing. Gigabyte’s EX58-Extreme worked well on our open platform, though the third card does extend below the lowest slot on standard cases.

Our second card came from MSI; its N295GTX-M201792 arrived overclocked to 655MHz GPU with GDDR3-2100 memory. We actually had to underclock this card to 576MHz/GDDR3-2000 reference speeds to make it cooperate with our reference card in Quad SLI. MSI says it could be releasing an overclocked board soon, which we'll be anxiously awaiting.

Our GTX-295 graphics cards were set to reference clock speeds, so it made sense to use reference-speed HD 4870 X2s in an apples-to-apples comparison. Our cards came from Sapphire.

Finally, the GTX 280 sets the standard for judging GTX 295 performance improvements. We tested three reference-speed cards in single, SLI, and 3-way SLI.