I had received a couple of 8800GTX cards when they were originally launched but couldn't test them out in SLI mode because of three reasons. First of all, the nForce 600 series wasn't available at that time and the nForce 590 boards I had did not play too well. Secondly, nVidia had stated that drivers weren't optimized for 8800 SLI at that time. And finally, I wasn't sure if my "paltry" 550W PSU would be good enough for it. today, I have the ASUS Striker Extreme based board with me along with a 800W PSU from Silverstone and the latest set of nVidia drivers. So with a little help from my friends at MSI, I received the 8800GTX for SLI action.

As with all higher-end MSI cards of late, the 7800GTX comes packaged in a standard sized light blue box depicting an angel. Inside the box, you find cables for Composite, component and S-Video as well as a couple of DVI-DSUB connectors. MSI also places two 6-pin PCI-E power connectors as the 8800GTX requires two. While drivers and applications are present, surprisingly, MSI does not bundle any games with the card.

The card is a standard reference design which means its huge in size. MSI uses a green PCB which, in my opinion, doesn't look as good as a black PCB that ASUS uses on their cards. Since we've already talked about the card in detail at launch, we figured we'd get straight to the benchmarks in an SLI setup. As noted above, we're using the ASUS Striker Extreme board with 2 x 1GB Corsair DDR2-800 modules and an Intel X6800 Core 2 CPU.