Installations can be a big problem for a novice user that is looking upgrade without any professional support, as installations go though a GFX card is thankfully one of the easier jobs that I have done in my time and should not be too much of a problem for anyone

The first thing that you need to do is remove your old graphics card drivers and any old GFX software, When asked for a restart, select no, then shutdown the computer the normal way, remove the side panel and your old graphics card/s and give the computer a dust down if needed. Oh yes this is and SLi review so let us get the two cards.

Once you are ready you will then need to insert the two Gainward Bliss 8800GTS into the PCI-E (express) slots and connect up the bridge. Once you have the Gainward Bliss 8800GTS placed in the PCI-E slot you will be faced with four VGA ports on the back of the card ladled LCD and LCD VGA, LCD VGA is used for SLi compatibility.

After plugging your monitor into the LCD VGA port booted your computer and once windows has started the Gainward Bliss 8800GTS will be detected, Then downloaded and install the latest NVIDIA GeForce Drivers, when prompted restarted and wait for windows to boot once again, windows should now detect that the Gainward Bliss 8800GTS  is SLi compatible and bring up a small pop-up showing that SLi can be activated, click on the pop-up and this should bring you to the SLi activation screen, from here it is a simple process of ticking the SLi options that you wish to activate. 

All finished, now that was not hard was it?

Test Bed system specs

Tests used 3Dmark 06, HL2, GTR3, Rainbow6 Vegas and Quake4.

3DMark 06 This is the result I received from 3DMark 06.

Rainbow Six: Vegas These are the results that I received while playing Rainbow Six: Vegas ; I played the same map with the following settings in the 3 different resolutions listed bellow V-Sync-on, everything else was set to full.

I was shocked at the low average frame rate as the game felt very playable even at 1280x1024 and rarely did I notice any loss of FPS, although at 1600x1200 the drop in frame rate more apparent and it could become unplayable at some points.

F.E.A.R These are the results that I received while playing F.E.A.R; same as before I played the same map 3 times in 3 different resolutions (listed bellow) all at the highest possible setting, FSAA 4x, Anisotropic Filtering 16x, V-Sync on, Textures, Shadows, Shaders and Lighting all set to full

The two bliss card smashed this game, not once did I notice any drop in FPS even running the game at 1600 x 1200, I must say the last time I played this I was disappointed because of the GFX I was using at the time, but the Bliss 8800 has revitalised this game for me.

GTR 3 These are the results that I received while playing GTR 3; I will follow my previous method of playing the same map 3 times at 3 different resolutions, all results are at full settings which include; FFSA 4x, Anisotropic Filtering, V-Sync on, Shadows, Shaders and Lighting all set to full.

Again the 8800s perform extremely well on a demanding game, I could happily play at 1600x 1200 without any problems and I must say everything was looking extremely pretty.

HL2 Not as new as some of the newer games on the market, but still a widely used and played game, that can still stress a GFX card

Thanks to the guys over at Doomey's home of [eXs]clan (83.245.62.2:13376) (http://www.exsclan.net/) for the fun while testing this

As you can see Hl2 Was playable at all resolutions with a decent frame rate, it is about time as the X1900XTX could run at 1600x1200 in Crossfire mode at these resolutions but their was a quite a substantial frame difference compared to the 8800GTS GS Bliss from Gainward. Also what was interesting was on this it showed just what SLi is for, as we saw there was only a slight difference in frame rate as we went up the resolutions. Here are some Screeners from GTR3 and F.E.A.R extraction point.

Next Page - Screen Shots