Well I received my pair of Galaxy GTX 480 and stayed up all night playing with them, so I'll give you all some initial impressions. I didn't bench them much because that's boring, instead I checked out a variety of games to see if they improved on the problems I had with the trifire setup. For the most part they did and come recommended for those gaming at 2560x1600. All games were maxed. I used the trifire overclocked to 875/1200 and the SLI varied between stock speeds and 790/2000. Also, I only play with vsynch on.
Far Cry 2- At 4x AA stock SLI lost by about 10%, so with an equivalent OC it would have been the same. At 8x AA stock SLI beat OC trifire pretty solidly. More importantly though, the trifire setup would choke at 8X AA, dipping below 10fps at two points whereas the SLI minimum was 55fps.
Modern Warfare 1/2 - The SLI cleared up a microstutter problem I had on the trifire. Also, trifire had abnormally low fps in unusual locations, the most notable being the first room from the first level of MW1 where you get your guns. For some reason that place always choked up the trifire, persisting through multiple driver revisions, but it runs fine on the SLI. I have no idea what the averages are and didn't test extensively since these games have no excuse for dipping below 60fps on either setup. The hitches on trifire definitely frustrated me when I originally played through MW2.
Bad Company 2 - both setups have a hard time getting AA working. Once in a blue moon I'll get it enabled properly. The SLI setup suffered far less from smoke/explosions in multiplayer which is what I was hoping, but the trifire runs the game very well outside of that and overall the experience is similar. SLI doesn't have the flickering line problem which I hear ATI is correcting.
Dawn of War 2 - this is massive domination for SLI, although when I played through it on the trifire it was on 9.12 drivers so maybe it works better now. But at the time, trifire was completely unplayable at 2560x1600 4xaa. The benchmark would choke into single digits. In fact, even at 0xaa some of the levels were really choppy at 2560 so I had to play this game at 1920. The minimum fps for SLI was 40 in the benchmark at 2560x1600 4xaa. The max was lower but overall the SLI is night and day better.
GTA IV - pure 480 domination here. To keep the game at 60fps while playing the trifire had to be set at 25 view dist, 50 detail dist, medium shadows. Go any higher and the game would choke when I turned around even though the GPUs were only at 70% utilization. Also, if I remember correctly this game only uses two GPUs even in trifire so that skews the results. Anyways, I played trifire on the 1.04 patch, and the game updated itself to 1.06 on steam against my will when I went to test the 480s. The 1.06 improves shadows a lot but also hurts performance because medium shadows look as good as high on 1.04. But anyways, with the SLI I was able to max everything, even shadow options that were turned off for trifire. Every single little shadow setting, all the view distance. And it always stayed 30fps with vsynch on, sometimes going to 45 or 60. That would have been single digits on trifire. Also, the SLI setup can keep a constant 60fps at much higher settings than trifire.
Hawx- For the most part trifire was fine at 2560x1600 with 2xAA or AA off, but there are a couple of levels that it really sucked on with massive stuttering. The SLI did not get rid of all the stuttering, but got rid of the vast majority.
Just Cause 2- Both setups really kick ass for this game. The SLI has far less hitching and it also lets you turn on CUDA water, but it also seemed to dip from 60fps to 45fps a bit more than the trifire. When the trifire got bogged down though, it got bogged down badly. This was the only game where I missed the somewhat higher average FPS that trifire should theoretically be able to provide. It's hard to call an advantage one way or another since there were things I liked about both and both do very well.
Overall my impressions matched up with these mostly:
http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?&m=303237&mpage=1
I am more positive on the 480s than him though since I play at 2560 which benefits them more and I also play with vsynch on so the maximum fps is not important to me.
Power usage was fine. For gaming the trifire + my 30 inch monitor would use 3 or 4 bars out of 5 on my 980 watt APC Smart UPS. The SLI also used 3 or 4 bars but was at 4 bars a lot more frequently.
Noise is also fine. I'd say the two setups were equally noisy. But the difference is that all that noise was keeping the trifire at 73-78c, whereas the sli gets up to 90c. My cards seem to game and idle hotter than what I've seen a lot of people reporting. Right now they're idling at 65/68c with the fan at 47%. But one thing I'll note is that you can't compare fan speeds between Fermi/5xxx series because at 47% these fans are really quiet whereas the 5xxx fans are loud at 47%.
The drivers are very good. These launch drivers are already at least as good as the 10.3 that ATI has out, although there's also a ATI beta that supposed to be a nice improvement. That is HUGE. I had a 5970 on launch and the drivers were terrible, with multigpu broken on a lot of games, AA problems, vsynch rarely being able to be forced on, etc, etc. It was a disaster and the ATI drivers are just now getting to be competent. I was worried about having to suffer through a similar period with Nvidia but that doesn't seem to be the case. Hopefully Nvidia has the requisite performance and scaling boosts but nothing is broken like it was on ATI with the initial drivers.
Overall I think the 480 SLI is a great setup for 2560 but may have less utility for those playing at 1920. I paid $910 after cashback for the two cards and I prefer the play experience to the trifire, which costs more. But I've also got to look at opportunity cost. I'm sort of tempted to put the 480s on ebay since they're selling higher than I expected. And keep in mind that a lot of games I tested were those that annoyed me on trifire so that can skew the tone a bit.
Far Cry 2- At 4x AA stock SLI lost by about 10%, so with an equivalent OC it would have been the same. At 8x AA stock SLI beat OC trifire pretty solidly. More importantly though, the trifire setup would choke at 8X AA, dipping below 10fps at two points whereas the SLI minimum was 55fps.
Modern Warfare 1/2 - The SLI cleared up a microstutter problem I had on the trifire. Also, trifire had abnormally low fps in unusual locations, the most notable being the first room from the first level of MW1 where you get your guns. For some reason that place always choked up the trifire, persisting through multiple driver revisions, but it runs fine on the SLI. I have no idea what the averages are and didn't test extensively since these games have no excuse for dipping below 60fps on either setup. The hitches on trifire definitely frustrated me when I originally played through MW2.
Bad Company 2 - both setups have a hard time getting AA working. Once in a blue moon I'll get it enabled properly. The SLI setup suffered far less from smoke/explosions in multiplayer which is what I was hoping, but the trifire runs the game very well outside of that and overall the experience is similar. SLI doesn't have the flickering line problem which I hear ATI is correcting.
Dawn of War 2 - this is massive domination for SLI, although when I played through it on the trifire it was on 9.12 drivers so maybe it works better now. But at the time, trifire was completely unplayable at 2560x1600 4xaa. The benchmark would choke into single digits. In fact, even at 0xaa some of the levels were really choppy at 2560 so I had to play this game at 1920. The minimum fps for SLI was 40 in the benchmark at 2560x1600 4xaa. The max was lower but overall the SLI is night and day better.
GTA IV - pure 480 domination here. To keep the game at 60fps while playing the trifire had to be set at 25 view dist, 50 detail dist, medium shadows. Go any higher and the game would choke when I turned around even though the GPUs were only at 70% utilization. Also, if I remember correctly this game only uses two GPUs even in trifire so that skews the results. Anyways, I played trifire on the 1.04 patch, and the game updated itself to 1.06 on steam against my will when I went to test the 480s. The 1.06 improves shadows a lot but also hurts performance because medium shadows look as good as high on 1.04. But anyways, with the SLI I was able to max everything, even shadow options that were turned off for trifire. Every single little shadow setting, all the view distance. And it always stayed 30fps with vsynch on, sometimes going to 45 or 60. That would have been single digits on trifire. Also, the SLI setup can keep a constant 60fps at much higher settings than trifire.
Hawx- For the most part trifire was fine at 2560x1600 with 2xAA or AA off, but there are a couple of levels that it really sucked on with massive stuttering. The SLI did not get rid of all the stuttering, but got rid of the vast majority.
Just Cause 2- Both setups really kick ass for this game. The SLI has far less hitching and it also lets you turn on CUDA water, but it also seemed to dip from 60fps to 45fps a bit more than the trifire. When the trifire got bogged down though, it got bogged down badly. This was the only game where I missed the somewhat higher average FPS that trifire should theoretically be able to provide. It's hard to call an advantage one way or another since there were things I liked about both and both do very well.
Overall my impressions matched up with these mostly:
http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?&m=303237&mpage=1
I am more positive on the 480s than him though since I play at 2560 which benefits them more and I also play with vsynch on so the maximum fps is not important to me.
Power usage was fine. For gaming the trifire + my 30 inch monitor would use 3 or 4 bars out of 5 on my 980 watt APC Smart UPS. The SLI also used 3 or 4 bars but was at 4 bars a lot more frequently.
Noise is also fine. I'd say the two setups were equally noisy. But the difference is that all that noise was keeping the trifire at 73-78c, whereas the sli gets up to 90c. My cards seem to game and idle hotter than what I've seen a lot of people reporting. Right now they're idling at 65/68c with the fan at 47%. But one thing I'll note is that you can't compare fan speeds between Fermi/5xxx series because at 47% these fans are really quiet whereas the 5xxx fans are loud at 47%.
The drivers are very good. These launch drivers are already at least as good as the 10.3 that ATI has out, although there's also a ATI beta that supposed to be a nice improvement. That is HUGE. I had a 5970 on launch and the drivers were terrible, with multigpu broken on a lot of games, AA problems, vsynch rarely being able to be forced on, etc, etc. It was a disaster and the ATI drivers are just now getting to be competent. I was worried about having to suffer through a similar period with Nvidia but that doesn't seem to be the case. Hopefully Nvidia has the requisite performance and scaling boosts but nothing is broken like it was on ATI with the initial drivers.
Overall I think the 480 SLI is a great setup for 2560 but may have less utility for those playing at 1920. I paid $910 after cashback for the two cards and I prefer the play experience to the trifire, which costs more. But I've also got to look at opportunity cost. I'm sort of tempted to put the 480s on ebay since they're selling higher than I expected. And keep in mind that a lot of games I tested were those that annoyed me on trifire so that can skew the tone a bit.
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