It wasn’t long ago NVIDIA launched Tri-SLI and the nForce 780i chipset. Even though we still find ATI at the top of the 3DMark 05 and 06 charts, the already NVIDIA-dominated 3DMark 03 has been in the center of attention for the last few days. Finnish overclocker Sampsa built his own Tri-SLI bridge using three smaller smaller SLI bridges, mainly because NVIDIA haven’t supplied the Nordics with any samples, and slapped three GeForce 8800 Ultras on an nForce 680i boards to get some Tri-SLi action. After swapping the air coolers for some Swiftech Stealt water blocks he managed to break the world record and score 103,888 points.
Since nForce 680i board lacks support for the latest quad-core processors from Intel he had to use the much and less efficient older Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 and settle for 4.7 GHz. The cards were running at 720 MHz GPU, 1720 MHz shader and 1180 MHz memory clock.
The record didn’t stand for long though as Fugger decided to join in and he had access to both an nForce 780i board and an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770. He had his processor up and running stable at 5 GHz in no time and slowly started to raise the frequencies of the cards.
The last result posted by Fugger was 108,720 points with GPU clocks at 732 MHz, shaders at 1813 MHz and the memories at 1175 MHz. Most likely not the last we will hear from 3-way SLI and 3Dmark 03.
None of the results have been submitted to the ORB due to a bug in the 3DMark 03 application. The CPU detection doesn’t work.