3DMark 2006 is pretty even, there is no significant lead here. It is disappointing that QuadSLI gains only 2.5% over running single-card

techPowerUp! has posted a comparison between NVIDIA Quad-SLI vs. ATI Crossfire. Here's an excerpt:

When I first heard about the opportunity to play with QuadSLI vs. Crossfire I expected QuadSLI to have a significant advantage over Crossfire but at an equally significant price difference. Now I am very disappointed. The driver installation seems to be very unstable. Also it seems nobody tested these cards on an ASUS board, where you have to change a BIOS setting to get the cards stable. The performance is absolutely not what you would expect from a "technology leader", "best of CES" product. In some benchmarks two ATI video cards were a great deal faster, even at the high resolutions which NVIDIA says are the key benefits of QuadSLI.

Even more humiliating was that one single 7900 GX2 often runs faster than two GX2 in QuadSLI.

Dear NVIDIA,
I have a great performance improvement suggestion for your next QuadSLI driver release:
if ((resolutionX<1600) && (resolutionY<1200))
DisableQuadSLI();

If you already have a Ferrari and a nice boat and now need something new to impress your friends you could shell out at least 7k for a Quad SLI system and a 30" widescreen gaming display. All other users may want to go for a more cost-effective and stable solution.

Twice the power and twice the money don't bring twice the performance..surprise? :)

Update: Another Quad-SLI perfomance previews can be found on FiringSquad and Bit-Tech.

That's right, the CPU. So bottom line is that these cards have allmost no use still, but cost as much as a brand new kidney... :?

Isn't the CPU being bottlenecked to the extreme here? I'd like to see someone run one of those Liquid nitrogen tests on a Quad SLI system and jack the fx-60 up to over 3.5 Ghz or whatever and see what happens. I think the scores would skyrocket. And BTW, developers better be making the next-gen games fully multiprocessor capable, otherwise this CPU bottleneck issue is going to end up hurting the industry.

I dream of having dual socket, dual core Opty's running on 8GB of ram and QSLI. Ofcoarse such a rig today wouldn't be any faster because the software isn't smart enough to take advantage. Us users need to get the message across: "We want SMP support and we want 64 Bit, and we want them yesterday!"

PS. What ever happened to the phase change cooling systems we were promised for $200 at CES? I bet with a setup like that you could atleast get the fx-60 upto 3Ghz or so stable. That might be enough of a boost to feed the monster that is QSLI.