Thoughts
I've deliberately staggered our SLI coverage over a few articles for a couple of reasons. It lightens my at-a-time load considerably, but it was also a conscious decision by us to get you thinking about SLI from base principles before overloading you with the performance data. Hopefully, with the 6800 GT performance on this initial driver and hardware platform, to add to the Ultra performance I showed you a couple of days ago, things are starting to become clearer. Sensible choices are making themselves known and you can see how SLI isn't always massive performance increases depending on the game and your processor.When thinking about SLI, think about your entire platform, especially when you're considering it as an upgrade path. I'll cover all of that in more detail in due course, but if SLI is definitely something you want to persue, the key price points of your CPU and mainboard choice are arguably of higher priority than the graphics cards you'll be choosing, to help you get the most out of the technology as an upgrade platform.
Issues surround NVIDIA's SLI certification program, but on the whole, a pair of 6800 GTs in my mind are something well worth considering if you've got the money, or at least the money for a nice platform and a single board in the near future.
I'll paint the complete picture in the next article, so stay tuned for that. Now excuse me while I seriously enjoy the framerates at awesome image quality in Half-Life 2 on a pair of GTs, abusing reviewer's privileges to the max.
