Testing Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980 4GB Graphics Cards In SLI

Final Thoughts

Multi-GPU systems seemed to have gained a negative reputation in the past for bugs, glitches and a lack of performance scaling. I myself have never seen anything to support that argument and today looking at these GTX 980s in SLI it is clear to see that scaling is very strong and the argument for choosing SLI is valid. We didn’t encounter any significant bugs or issues in testing and the 70% scaling figure we can quote from our results is very reasonable. Furthermore, with overclocking, an additional 10% can be had on top of that and that wasn’t very hard to achieve either.

GTX 980s in SLI offer an incredible amount of performance for a surprisingly low amount of power consumption and if you absolutely need to drive framerates to the maximum you can’t go too wrong with this type of setup. The kind of use-case scenarios for GTX 980s in SLI that we would suggest are numerous. You could use GTX 980 SLI for:

• Generating enough frames to match 144Hz displays at 1080p or 1440p (especially G-Sync displays)
• Powering 4K gaming to the magic 60 FPS level on the current wave of 60Hz 4K monitors
• Driving the Nvidia Surround gaming experience across multiple 1080 or 1440p displays at playable frame-rates

Nvidia GTX 980 SLI is downright expensive, $1100 in total just for the GPUs, but considering the kind of display real-estate you’d need to make use of such GPU power this is realistic for the target audience. SLI will always be for a niche market but you can be rest assured if you are part of that niche market it does deliver what you pay for. My only word of warning would be that 2-Way configurations are known to scale very well but if you were to start scaling up to 3 and 4 way configurations the experience might not be as seamless.

Thank you to Nvidia and Gigabyte for providing these review samples.