In 1998, then-king of the graphics card market, 3Dfx, introduced SLI (or Scan Line Interleave), which essentially took two PCI video cards, hooked them together, and while one processed even-numbered lines, the other processed odd-numbered lines. Essentially, it was the natural evolution of the current technology. Computers had spare PCI ports, and rather than making graphics cards that were more powerful, maybe it’d be better to simply diasy-chain them to increase your power.
NVidia is bringing the same theory back. Also, here. This time, things are a bit different. The card-to-card connection is a simple bridge, as opposed to several messy wires. The port is PCI-Express (which is another article altogether). The cards are NVidia’s new GeForce 6800 cards, their new flagship (that gets trounced by ATI’s X800 series).
While the concept itself is intriguing, just like Gigabyte’s dual-power motherboards and AMD/Intel’s dual processors or dual-core processors, one has to wonder what kind of performance gain we can expect to see, and for what cost. NVidia promises about a 60% improvement, which seems a bit sad when you consider that the costs would rise by 200%. Especially when Chaintech’s GeForce 6800 for AGP is $600. Even assuming that the PCI-X cards wouldn’t cost more (they will, I think), that’s $1200 just for a gaming solution. Now, I spent almost $500 on my Asus 9800XT, but $1200? In addition to everything else needed for an enthusiast machine? Maybe if you’re bloody rich.
Another thing to worry about is heat output. From the screenshots, these two cards are more or less spooning on the motherboard. How is one going to get proper ventilation when its fan is blowing hot air at the underside of the other, a centimeter (or less) away?
SLI is another example of what one can do with an unlimited budget, but I get the feeling that a graphics solution that costs over $1k is going to be out of reach even for dedicated enthusiasts.