If you yearn for the halceon days of your old Matrox Millenium 2D card being souped up and made into a god-like graphics demon with the addition of not one, but two fabulous Voodoo2 cards in SLI mode, then you'll be interested in what you can do with two nVidia 6800s on a new PCI-Express motherboard. Just make sure that your PSU is at least 550W and you have enough cooling in the box to chill a side of beef :lol:
The new SLI is not the same as the old SLI, the screen is simply split into 'top half' and 'bottom half' and the cards get on with 'their' bit of rendering. But the nVidia solution differs from the Alienware solution in that the nVidia solution will 'load balance' between the two cards. So if the top half of the screen is a complex PITA to render, nVidia's controller will give more work to the 'bottom half' card to balance the gfx load. Alienware simply splits the screen 50/50 (again, top and bottom half) via a software driver. You can read more about the Alienware solution here (http://www20.graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040528/index.html).
(For those who recall, the original SLI alternated the lines on the screen each card rendered.)
Allegedly performance of between 1.8-2.0 times that of a single card can be obtained, but you'll need to be careful on the system you have to make sure it will fit the mobo, have sufficient power, slots and cooling.
For you modern day SLI fix click here (http://www20.graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040628/index.html).
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(http://www20.graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040628/images/nvsli1.jpg)
That's 4 PCI slots gone straight away <_<
And count the power connectors you'll need to use up :lmfao:
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