Oblivion does not look really good without HDR, so FSAA with no HDR is less desirable mode than pure HDR.

We had time constaints with this review. If we had more time, we would definitely think more benchmark options.

Thanks for the reply. Its an opinion that Oblivion does not look good without HDR. There are lots of people who prefer AA over HDR. Any chance of revising the review, when you get more time? Thanks.

Thank you for understanding. Future reviews will definitely bring more benchmark numbers!

We had time constraints with the time for testings. Nvidia states in a document that two GeForce 7900 GX2 boards consume 300W.

"After numerous crashes we decided to switch to a 1000W power supply unit bought in Northern America, as we believed that the 660W power supply shipped with the system (as there are no higher-wattage power supplies in Europe) could not supply enough power for the machine. Even after the 1kW PSU was installed, the crashes and freezes remained."

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/geforce7900- uad-sli_10.html

missed that :)
seems like nvidia is in trouble. if they ship the product in this condition, theres gonna be some really angry people with -10k$ on their bank account

[b]7900 GX2 q-SLI [/b] idle/load 287/472W 24A/39A
[b]x1900XTX CFire[/b] idle/load 263/494W 22A/41A

Tagan ships 900W and 1100W units in Europe

A reason why the site is slow is the inflow of /. readers. Also note that other sites like /. are sending readers here. The servers they listed seem to be holding up well so far. Adding another might be nice, but something they won't need unless they expect more users from the attention they are getting for the article. The article was a good read (the few parts that I did read), all the information was put together very nicely with a good eye toward being unbiased. A note though, would to have all the graphs on the same scaled 1-100 or such, so as the casual reader won't make a mistake looking at the charts, granted you have the numbers inside the chart too. And good analogy of luxury cars with an eye to stability and performance, and not just performance.

In the left bar, press 'print article' then you will get the review in one page.

Well, what do you think M$ does? :D

True! But 10,000 dollars though...dayum.

Yes you can. It goes to show what a waste the other 2 gpus really are. Besides, what else would you compare it with?

Great review guys! Must really have hurt to have all the crashing & artifacts! The first thing that springs to my mind is DIMINISHING RETURNS!!!! from the outset a GPU thinks of itself as a single entity, as this is the main business model for both ATI & nVidia! writing drivers that attempt to share the workload between them makes little sense (outside the marketing division of a company that wants u to buy multiples of their product)

The introduction of the steering chip makes more sense, however the chip itself MUST not become the bottleneck! I think the total combined bandwith possible of the entire 4 gpu data path must be easily handled by the steering chip, possibly by a factor of 2x!

So I think

All gpu's manufactured must be multi-gpu aware and must know how to adapt it's behaviour in a 2x or 4x situation. sticking single minded devices together obviously does not work efficiently!!

As a side note I would rather have clicked a link 20+ times (so u got your revenue) and then been allowed to download a PDF to read instead of reading online on a congested site!!

Thanks for you diligent & indepth review
Just my 2pence