Weird: Triple SLI GTS 250 vs GTX 480

So I decided to play around with my graphic cards and have 2 systems. Each are almost identical.. one being slightly faster then the other. So I decided to put them head to head in a few benchmarking test. The phenomenon that occured blew my mind. The triple SLI GTS 250, which is in the slower system, was outperforming and remaining cooler then the GTX480.. I decided.. lets play crysis.. got a friend to come over and loaded Crysis on very high 1920x1200 4xAA on both systems and took it for a test run. We idle about the same.. 32 FPS and when the action started to get going the GTX480 at times dropped to 11 FPS while the triple sli gts 250 would drop down to about 21 FPS.. So this bit of information intrigued me and I decided to share it with all of you.

RMA your 480.

2 480's will likely yeild similar numbers. 3 480's, and unless you have a radically overclocked i7 CPU, the CPU will be a huge bottleneck at that point. I know I have read reviews where the verdict was that 3 480's isn't worth it, 2 will perform almost as well. A Guy

The 480 was just at a bit disadvantage two the triple sli. Though there is very few cases that I have witness it outperform my triple sli pc.. as soon as better support comes around for quad I'll be buying another gts 250. This shows the different from 'mainstream' facts and actual practical use.

And what processor was in the 480 system? My single GTX470 performs faster than them 480s in Crysis, so it's strange.

Wich drivers where used? The new 258.xx are really good with the GTX4xx cards...

257.21 drivers were used..

the triple sli gts 250 has a AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz

the 480 has a AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition Thuban 3.2GHz

psymon119 said:

So you're blaming your video card's apparent worse performance because you're cpu can't handle it ^^.

Graphics card tests don't use CPU.

EDIT: Yes, I see he just played Crysis. That is not a real benchmark, its a game.

~Lordbob