Towards the end of our review of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 graphics card in solo, we reluctantly accepted the tradeoff NVIDIA forced upon us, between performance with tons of features, and high power draw, temperatures, noise levels, and the relatively high price-point. GeForce GTX 480 SLI makes the ropewalk even tighter, where a $1000 graphics solution that draws the power of three office PCs by itself, meets awe-inspiring levels of performance. Speaking of which, GeForce GTX 480 SLI aced all our tests, with leading frame rates among single graphics cards.

This solution is particularly suited for resolutions beyond 1920 x 1200, more towards 30” displays with 2560 x 1600 pixels resolution. On lower resolutions, it tends to not offer much of an advantage over having the single card, or other competing single-card solutions such as the ATI Radeon HD 5970. The HD 5970 is the strongest contender, since it ends up being just 13% slower, with less than half the energy footprint. This is what makes performance figures of GTX 480 SLI less than impressive as a solution. With multi-GPU scaling, as expected, GTX 480 scales better with increase in resolutions over the single GTX 480. However, compared to Radeon HD 5870 in its 2-card CrossFire setup, the scaling is a little worse (overall 41% for GTX 480 SLI vs. 43% for HD 5870 CrossFire), an area that needs attention from NVIDIA.

The case for GTX 480 SLI further gets aggravated with factors such as high temperatures, the highest power draw for any two-card solution, and the price-point of $1000. However, NVIDIA’s value added features come to the rescue with industry-leading GPU compute APIs such as CUDA, PhysX technology with the advantage of letting you task PhysX computation to the secondary card, 3D Vision Surround technology which lets you connect three monitors into a large display-head with stereoscopic 3D support, and much better application-specific support NVIDIA GPUs traditionally enjoy, especially in multi-GPU setups. NVIDIA aggressively releases new multi-GPU application profiles for new games as they release, and that a 3D application performance in SLI doesn’t break if the application is or gets windowed, something that is still a limitation for some ATI CrossFire setups. If NVIDIA’s solutions draw you to them, we would suggest that you pick the single GTX 480 and be content with its performance and features. But if you’re seeking performance, consider other highly-competitive solutions before committing yourself to GTX 480 SLI.