i think that SLI would be cool if u can add different cards like first a 6600 GT after u got some money just buy a 6800GT and add it, then SLI would be great.

NVIDIA's SLI Shortchanges Gamers?

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzEx

Say it's not so. ;)

I voted GIMMICK in the poll.

If the game you are using supports SLI and If you don't mind onlyt having 128MB of texture memory (perhaps even less) then you could go for a 660GT for comedy value (read ego-boost)

However, in reality you get the following for your faith in nVidia's 6600GT's:

$100 less in your pocket
less performance than an X800XL
Half the RAM (for $400 I want more than "medium" texture detail)
Twice the number of fans
Twice the space requirements (impossible for shuttle XPC's or equivalents)
Support for games only in a few cases (what was it, 16 tiles?)
The need for 2 PCI power connector adapters if you don't already have them.
Pointless duplicates of any TV-out hardware and
Pointless duplicates of free software
Twice the likely failure rate (or redundancy - depends how you look at it)
Twice the heat production just underneath your CPU fan intake
Twice as many waterblocks needed
You are (probably) held back in overclocking by the slowest card - even if one of them overclocks to the moon, it won't help if the other one crashes after a 10MHz increase.

Today, green = bad, red = good

Great review but when is the obvious going to be stated when listing the cons of sli TWO FANS! more noise.

Obviously I wasn't paying close enough attention, but when did the Radeons become so competitive in Doom3. I had thought that ATI was D3's bitch.... Maybe it's time I updated my Catalysts. :)

Boy, the 6800 GT AGP sure looks good compared to an expensive SLI board with two PCI-E 6600GT cards.

*Yawn* I could get a 6800GT or a X800XL and still have money left to spend. The cost of a SLI setup (mb + cards) is very unappealing to say the least.

If you are a gamer who also has 3 or 4 monitors when they aren't in 'game' mode, then SLI might be the way to go, as they can use both cards to drive their displays when not gaming, and then tie them together when gaming and get good performance.

Of course, a gamer could just buy a top of the range card for gaming, and slam in some cheap card (6200TC) for the other monitors anyway. They'd still need the SLI motherboard however, for the two PCIe x16 slots - although I did see a picture of an x2 slot with the end removed so that >x2 cards can be used in it, with reduced performance of course.

Me? PC gaming lost its lustre for me. I have a couple of consoles that keep me sated when I need to game. I've got sick of living in my office where my PC is, I don't need to spend more time there than necessary!

until NewEgg has X850s and X800 XLs in stock .. they arent really available.

they still have X800 Pros listed for $400 does anyone seriously think they'll be selling X800 XL for $300 when the pros are still running for a hundred more.

ATI needs to quit marketing a dozen different products and actually focus on MAKING a few.

What I don't understand is how could there be a huge dramatic change in the stability of the system without any changes to the elements, i.e. drivers, BIOS ROMs, etc.

...I didn't change BIOS revisions, video drivers, or anything else of note since testing the 6800 Ultra cards. With the exact same configuration, the Asus 6600 GT cards in SLI ran flawlessly.

This experience led me to go back to the 6800 Ultra cards and try them again in SLI. To my surprise, they were stable the second time around, as well...

How does a configuration just automagically become stable?

I want my Voodoo 2 SLI 8*(

Trying to find the 6800GT in PCIe is near impossible. Can anyone say vaporware?

Hah. Finally some facts to counter the shameless SLI cheerleading seen on earlier reviews/previews, esp. the one at [H].

expensive mobo + equal/lower performance + high power consumption/heat output + game issues = teh no

oh yeah:
http://www.techreport.com/sympoll/polllist.php?dispid=80&vo=80

Thank you, good read as always! :)

Now to my thoughts on SLI; it seemed a bit strange how in some circumstances the 6600GT SLI was outperforming the 6800GT SLI and in the majority of cases where the 6800GT SLI was ahead I don't think the performance difference would justify 2x the cost. In fact I think you'd have to be mad to want SLI of either 6800GT or 6800Ultra cards, the 6600GT SLI is pretty much the only viable SLI option IMO.

It seems to me that a single card solution is a much more feasible option than turning to SLI for performance, a single 6800GT, 6600GT or X800XL would all be good options IMO. We've seen yet again that the X800XL could potentially become the best value card to be had, but that remains to be seen. I don't think that the added hassles of SLI are worth it for the occasional performance margins to be had, and in some cases there weren't any or they were too minute to matter. Throw in power consumption / noise into the mix and I think that the scales are heavily weighted against SLI, at least from my point of view, as for some it would be a moddy/cool type thing to have.

Nice review... but you forgot one thing:

Our test results show that a pair of GeForce 6600 GTs in SLI can rival the performance of a single GeForce 6800 GT card in some cases. That's not a bad upgrade proposition: add together two $200 video cards to get the performance of one $400 video card.

+ the $50-$100 premium for an SLI motherboard = $450-$500.

If I were in the market for a card, I'd stick with the 6800GT or the x800XL. Full 256Megs of memory, no added motherboard cost, probably better resale, but that's hard to say, better power consumption figures,

I have a conspiracy theory that SLI was merely a bargaining chip for Nvidia to leverage in order to get a P4 bus liscense.

This technology needs to mature a bit. "Compatibility modes" leads me to believe that we're going to see lots of crashing randomly and have to determine why? Stability is the most important factor with any piece of hardware. If it's not stable, it's not useable.

Sli is made mostly for those with the money to buy a 5k gaming system with the cards already set in it.

Later on as pcie boards gain capacity and can handle more and more channels at once we will see far more common boards with 16 8 1 1 or 16 16 4 1 configs not JUST for graphics but for other high bandwidth devices.

Excellent review.
I am ready to get a video card, so it is nice to see what is going on at this time for all these cards.

how do you run the farcry demos? which directory do you put the .tmd files?

The "and we have reason to believe that they will" link on the conclusion page is not working.