PCI Express was introduced by Intel in the middle of last year with the release of the 915 and 925 chipsets. PCI Express is a Serial connection replacing the PCI bus. Installation of a PCI Express video card is similar to installing an AGP card. Simply find a open PCI Express slot, align the card with the slot and slide it in. There is a new 6-pin power connector for the high end video cards. With SLIed 6800GTs or Ultras, you need to plug in two of these new power connectors. They retail for around $5 online if the new PCI Express card didn’t come with one.

Setup of SLI is easy. Once you plug in both cards into their respective slots, simply attach the SLI board, make sure the daughtercard is set to SLI (or Normal if the 3D1 card) and plug in the external power connectors. At this point power on the computer and boot into Windows. Windows should find New Hardware and install the latest Forceware drivers. Once Windows restarts, you'll get a balloon saying "You have an SLI capable system. Click here to enable it".

NVIDIA has 2 currently available drivers on Nzone and nvidia.com. Both the 66.93 and 67.03 are SLI enabled. After downloading the driver, simply double click the exe file to install it. After a reboot to set the new drivers, the driver will inform you that the system is ready for SLI rendering. From here, simply go into display properties and the SLI tab and check the checkbox to SLI mode. After another reboot, you are set to go.

Asus provided us with 2 6600GTs for testing SLI with. Unfortunately, the boards they provided were revision A03. According to NVIDIA’s PR, revision A04 or higher is necessary to run in SLI mode and problems have been noted on Tom’s Hardware of a similar nature. In any event, I attempted to run the cards in SLI mode, but was unsuccessful. Windows would boot and 2D was great. 3D apps, however would crash after a few minutes at most of running any application or benchmark. While I dearly wanted to run dual 6600GTs for this article, I was unable to due to the chipset revision.