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GeForce GTX 470: Dual and 3-way SLI Performance Analysis

By Kenny Yeo - 29 May 2010

Effects of Overclocking the CPU

Effects of Overclocking the CPU

Looking at the results so far, we can see that for most cases, adding a third GeForce GTX 470 isn't going to get you much gains. However, this could be because the CPU is acting as a bottleneck. Hence, we've overclocked our Core i7 975 processor to 3.72GHz (up from 3.33GHz) to see if any substantial gains can be gotten.

And as the following graphs show, with a faster processor, we see the GeForce GTX 470 3-way SLI configuration performing better, showing some gains over the 2-way SLI setup. Looks like you'll need a really, really high-end setup to get the most out of a 3-way SLI configuration. That said, the bigger issue is that NVIDIA has to improve the scalability of 3-way SLI. You can tell from the results from the previous pages that 2-way SLI works very well for the GTX 470 and if you compare that with the competition, the Radeon HD 5870 achieves somewhat acceptable 2-way CrossFire scaling, but fares much better with 3-way CrossFireX. The GTX 470 being a much newer card, it is perhaps not well tuned for 3-way operation at the moment and our results from boosting the CPU performance further confirmed this as the gains weren't much.

Looking at the bigger picture, the gains that can be had from slapping on a third card is most likely going to go unnoticed because a 2-way GeForce GTX 470 SLI configuration is already sufficiently quick. On Bad Company 2, for instance, two GeForce GTX 470 cards in SLI is going to net you above 100fps, which is fantastic by itself.

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