Conclusion

While people will compare the ultra high end ATI configuration against Nvidia's SLIx3 this is not really the point of this article. We wanted to follow up our earlier Skulltrail launch article with a look at how the platform is fairing 7 months later. As Nvidia decided to allow Skulltrail compatibility with 3 cards in SLI we felt it was the perfect time to do so.

If you have read this article, you will have seen that the XFX GTX 280 XXX generally comes out on top. Obviously the 280 cores are superior to the 4870's, however I still feel the Skulltrail board has some minor issues with the ATI cards, something we noticed at launch with the last Radeon series.

The problems we experienced with Catalyst driver installation, black screens and signals being lost as well as a few BSOD's on reboot would make me feel, that although some of these issues are down to the beta drivers, that the two platforms are perhaps still not fully working as they should, to be fair however, generally the 4870 X2's worked well with Skulltrail. Obviously some of the performance blame will be placed at Skulltrail's feet, after all its a specialist low volume system and in the grand scheme of things, ATI will certainly not be putting much focus into optimising for it.

Nvidia on the other hand have surprised me with their new PhysX drivers, because apart from one hard lock when switching "on" 3x SLI in the driver on the first reboot, the whole experience has been pain free and a joy to use. I would strongly recommend however if you are fortunate enough to have access to this system that you update immediately to the 1140 bios (64 bit OS version here) because it fixes some incompatibility issues with the 280 cards as well as providing numerous other bug fixes. There is also now support for half ratio capable processors. Full bug fix list is here.

So in direct relation to Skulltrail, which makes the best graphics card combination? Well clearly it would be Sli x3, however if you consider the price of around £350 inc vat for each card this is totalling around £1050. If you put this into perspective this would buy you an Xbox 360, A Nintendo Wii, a Playstation 3 and you would still have enough left over to buy this pc from Yoyotech. That said, if you are wealthy enough to own Skulltrail already then three top of the range graphics cards will be no problem. The Ati cards come in at around £700 so that is a saving of £350.

In regards to cooling, we already know the 4870 X2's get rather toasty and I recorded full load temperatures of around 95c. That said, they never crashed and ATI's claims to us last week that they "are built for those temperatures" would certainly seem to ring true, for now anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few months we start to see complaints on our forums. Frustratingly there is still no end user manual fan control in Catalyst Control Center, which is a glaring omission. Thankfully, just as we went to press there is a new tool which allows for fan speed control on the 4870 X2, its called Experttool-ATI and you can get it from here.

The XFX 280's come pre-overclocked and work fine individually, however if you slot three of them into a single system, they begin to heat up, considerably. I recorded load temperature increases from around 65c in single card to around 85c. Thankfully Ntune supports three cards at a time and you can individually toggle fan speed. Putting all three cards to 100% fan raises the noise levels, however it is bearable and it manages to help get things back under control and temperatures drop by a good 8-10c. In my testing the 280 cards are not so stable under extreme temperatures as the X2 cards.

Skulltrail is certainly far from perfect, it is tied down to fully buffered DDR2 memory which is far from cutting edge by today's standards, however as a gaming machine it is still more than capable of coping with anything today's titles can ask for. It works well with Nvidia's PhysX drivers, and I enjoyed a few late nights gaming with GRAW2. The benefits of being able to change to Crossfire and back without any system changes is another massive bonus point and I hope multiplatform motherboards start getting a hold in the marketplace, after all how many of you guys would like to hang onto the motherboard you just purchased if you fancy swapping from green to red or vice versa?

We have already gave the 4870 X2's our Heavenly Hardware Gold Award for performing excellence, however today I would also like to give that award to the XFX 280 GTX XXX cards. If you are an Nvidia fan with a larger budget then these cards should already be in your shopping basket. They are the fastest Nvidia boards we have tested.

For those of you on tighter budgets, recent pricing updates to Nvidia products (£244 for leadtek GTX280) means that 3 way Sli is now available for around the £750 mark, however the cores will be slower than the XFX XXX models on test today at 602mhz, that said with manual overclocking the performance differential would be lessened.