Let me be a little nostalgic here. I’ve been reviewing video cards over 4 years starting ironically with a 3dfx Voodoo 5 5500 which is two video chips on one card. 3dfx epitomized the multiple graphics card in one system philosophy with the Voodoo 2, the Voodoo 5 5500 and the ultimate card the Voodoo 5 5500. Now that they’ve been gone for 4 years, many including myself have felt that the market place for video cards has stagnated. ATI and NVIDIA make great cards, don’t get me wrong. To be honest, however, there simply isn’t much competition on the graphics card market today. Whether you choose an ATI X850XT PE or a NVIDIA 6800 Ultra, you get similar performance and image quality.

Let’s talk about what SLI gives the average gamer. For the average gamer, SLI simply isn’t for you. Two 6800GTs will run around $800 MSRP today. The Gigabyte board I ran benchmarks on will run you another $200-300. That’s over a grand just on the motherboard and video card.

For the enthusiast, that absolutely wants the highest performance in the popular games of today, SLI can be a no-brainer. Performance in the benchmarks shows a marked improvement over a single card. As long as your power supply is up to the task of providing enough power to the two video cards, and you are willing to live with the fact that 4 of your slots will be covered on the motherboard, SLI works as advertised.

The upgrade persona in me just loves SLI. Imagine building a computer today, and having the choice tomorrow to either sell the old video card, or, buy a 2nd card to increase performance 30-50%. Too often, we see video cards with exorbitant price tags that go down in price by more than 1/3 of what the card originally retailed for. For example, the 9800 Pro, which this time last year was $449 retail, retailed for $199 on special sales. With a single 6800GT you get excellent performance, with dual 6800GTs you get better performance than the highest end single card, the x850XT PE, but you pay a price premium today.

To be honest, if you’ve read this far, you’ve already made up your mind on SLI. There’s always another video card coming with more performance. Technology moves forward at an ever-increasing pace. We’ll likely see NVIDIA’s next generation card late this year and ATI will likely release their next generation Shader Model 3.0 supporting card in the middle of this year. If SLI is as popular as it seems to be already (motherboard manufacturers can’t make enough SLI boards at the moment), this will be an enthusiast’s dream.

This year we will likely see multiple GPU motherboard chipsets from ATI, Via, SIS and NVIDIA for both the Intel and AMD platforms. NVIDIA’s SLI was the first to market and has already gained a loyal following in the high-end consumer market. One thing is for certain, the possibility of building a system with a single graphics card today and later nearly doubling the performance tomorrow for a lower price is an awesome concept. I want to thank Brian Burke for the opportunity to review SLIed video cards. It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed reference cards from NVIDIA.

Performance - 10 Features - 10 Compatibility - 10 Price - 6 Availability - 10 Setup - 10 Overall Value - 9 Ease Of Use - 10 Support - 10 Software - 10 TOTAL: 95