I just got it now reading this article. we bought our 680i's long ago, not much was spoken about why we had the 3rd PCI-e slot we have in our motherboards. And now by end of year 2007, they have the new line up of products out but also unleash a refreshment to the previous series with features that were locked for an entire year. That way, they can boost sales of the 8th series graphics cards at the right time before they go cheap and to give way for the 9800's high-end cards.
Reminds of Microsoft. we customers, hate products to be time-planned upon us!

No one is going to buy 3 graphics cards for a motherboard that only supports 2... so this is idiotic right?

No. This is checkmate. This is so brilliant that it wreaks of brilliantness and could put AMD out of business.

What the Heck am I talking about? The article is misleading. The third graphics chip is embedded to the motherboard at a cost of $30.

So for $30 more, you get SLI... double performance. And on thop of that you can add a second graphics card... and for $30 more (vs. $300 for SLI)... you get increased performance... and the fastest system on the market. 10% cost for 50% performance is a winner... and changes the balance of power towards Nvidia's favor.

This is called "HYBRID SLI" and it is right around the corner.

Improving Driver quality? you're hinting at Vista, am I right? Firstly, with Vista, it takes time to optimize drivers since the codebase is so different (thousands of lines of code, you expect it to be completely bug free?) with the 162.xx series, nvidia's forceware has improved leaps and bounds and keeps getting better. keep in mind that XP's drivers were a nightmare too, when it was launched. Vista is barely 1 year old. Miracles don't happen in computing, everything slowly progresses. it'll take nVidia quite a while to give all the functions in Vista, so either quit whining or go back to XP.

"AMD will put them in the back even with their shabby products."

Errr.. Stop smoking whatever you're smoking...

as for Tri-SLI, the only thing that worries me at this point is the heat dissipation. three High end GPUs stacked together will generate a tremendous amount of heat. It'll be interesting to see how overclockers and enthusiasts deal with this. Water cooling maybe?


What about all the lowend cards that are SLi able? 3 7600GTs would be awsome! Hell, three 8500GTs in tri-SLi would be way cool for budget gamers. If you actuly think about it, it kinda makes sence. If you have two 8500GTs in SLi for a total of about $130 and get the same performance of a single 8800GTS that runs for about $260. I think I would take to two 8500GTs. SLi isn't just for the big boys with big toys.

Having bought an SLI rig with one card which, at the time could play all the games without the use of another card. I was thinking that when it couldn't play them I'd buy another. Time that happened, you can't buy the card any more and even if you did the latest card kicks sand in the SLI combo's face.

As Usual Nvidia is wasting their time on something which will be used by very low amount of people. They better improve their drive quality first and try this fancy tri-sli later or else AMD will put them in the back even with their shabby products.

Tri- Sli

I have to agree that Nvidia is focusing to much to the "Rich boys"

2 cards are already cost enough

You can imagine what 3 cards can cost...

How many people are going to waste their money for buying 3 cards when every 6 months we always get new solutions

Tri-Sli = waste of time and money

Better focus in even better drivers and in 1 card solutions