Gigabyte GV-3D1

Posted 07/01/2005 at 9:13am | by

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Innovative design, but with significant drawbacks

Disingenuous marketing claims frost our nether regions, and Gigabyte makes a doozy by describing its GV-3D1 single-slot SLI card as having a 256-bit memory interface. Gee, how’d they manage that when the dual GPUs at the heart of this card are outfitted with 128-bit memory buses? It’s easy: Add 128 and 128, and—ta-dah!—you get 256!

OK, we’ll cut Gigabyte a little slack because the GV-3D1 is pretty ingenious. Gigabyte’s engineers figured out how to mount two nVidia GeForce 6600 GTs and two 128MB frame buffers onto a single circuit board that runs in SLI mode. The problem is that the only motherboard with which the GV-3D1 is compatible is Gigabyte’s nForce4 GA-K8NXP-SLI. Well, there are other problems, but that’s the big one.

Although Gigabyte is making noises about offering the GV-3D1 as a stand-alone product, the only way you could purchase it at press time was as part of a $530 bundle with the aforementioned motherboard. Because the card must specifically be supported in the mobo’s BIOS, it will likely remain compatible only with Gigabyte mobos. Unless you’re considering a motherboard upgrade and a simultaneous videocard upgrade, this product will hold no real interest for you.

Before we examine this card’s performance, let’s see if the bundle
makes any economic sense. Purchased separately, Gigabyte’s GA-K8NXP-SLI motherboard is street-priced at about $165. Add a pair of Gigabyte’s PCI Express GeForce 6600 GT boards at $170 each, and you’ll have spent $505. With the street price of the bundle hovering around $495, you’ll save yourself a whopping $10. Big deal.
You save $10 with the bundle, but you lose a lot of flexibility. If you purchase two stand-alone GeForce 6600 GT boards, you’ll get two DVI and two VGA ports, which lets you drive up to four displays. You can also use those two stand-alone boards in any PCI Express mobo. The GV-3D1 is limited to this mobo.

If the GV-3D1 delivered stellar performance, we could easily overlook these drawbacks. But it doesn’t, thanks to its too-small 128MB frame buffer and puny eight-pipeline design. (Remember, on SLI configs, both cards store the same data in onboard RAM, so two 128MB cards in SLI do not have 256MB of effective memory.) The board couldn’t deliver in our Doom 3 test; at High Quality, 1600x1200 resolution, with 4x antialiasing enabled, the board cranked out just 34.2fps. The same goes for Far Cry. With all that game’s features maxed out, the board mustered a mere 39.3fps.

Halo performance at 1600x1200 was an impressive 77.9fps, but we attribute that more to the game’s use of low-res textures than the GV-3D1’s prowess. Likewise for the board’s 3DMark03 and 3DMark05 scores; sure, they’re higher than those for a single GeForce 6800 Ultra, but only at lower resolutions (1024x768). The scores in 3DMark03 Games 2 and 4 at 1600x1200 were a much humbler 23.0- and 26.2fps, respectively.

We’ll review the motherboard portion of this product bundle at a later date. As for the GV-3D1, it’s an interesting engineering exercise, but there’s just no compelling reason for us to recommend it.
—Michael Brown

+ Pocket Rocket: SLI performance while consuming a single slot.

-Pocket Lint: Petite frame buffers and narrow pixel pipelines limit you to low-res gaming; available only with bundled mobo.

Month Reviewed: July 2005
Verdict: 5
URL: www.giga-byte.com