VR Features

Test Bench Setup

The 780i with it's triple x16 slots screams to be in a 3-Way SLI setup. We dug around, and begged about for the hardware so as to bring you some geek pornography. The cast for today includes the Intel QX9650, Transcend AxeRAM, Inno3D 8800GTX (Not one, but three. Yes, you got it right, it's T-H-R-E-E.), Scythe Andy and a slew of 7200.7 Seagate Barracudas.

Of course, none of these would have run without the Silverstone Olympia 1200W PSU. Sounds like Athens? It sure has the muscle with 90A on the single 12V rail.

Here is the CPU-Z summary of the setup, on default clocks.

BIOS was 0501, with Windows Vista x86 as the operating system of choice. 169.25 Forceware and 9.46 nForce drivers took duty for the benchmarks.

Power Consumption

Attempting to power four CPU units and a total of 384 Stream Processors isn't going to be green by any standards. Here's the power consumption numbers with a nifty power meter.

Idle

Idle power consumption in Vista was already over 300W. Let's see how it does when we load all 3 graphics accelerators and a CPU core.

Load - 2560x1600 Canyon Flight 8xAA

Canyon Flight isn't known to be a multi-threaded Game Test within 3DMark06, but it loads all the GPUs at once in 3-Way SLI. Power consumption hovers around the top end of 500W, peaking a little over 600W at times.