SLI, Scalable Link Interface, from what I’ve read, is not a new technology but an old one. This technology was revisited because of the introduction of PCI-e.
The interesting thing about SLI is using 2 graphic cards on a single machine. Sort of similar to machines with dual CPUs.
For gaming, you can have each graphic card render a portion of the screen. Load is balanced between them from some experiments I’ve seen on the net. Which is they don’t render a fixed 50% of the screen but varies constantly depending on what’s shown on the screen. This means a huge increase in gaming performance.
Another possibility that I’ve read this morning is having 4 monitors hooked up to a single machine, assuming each card has 2 DVI outputs. To me, it means I can now have monitor #1 displaying system info (Samurize, MySQL Administrator), #2 showing mIRC, #3 – Firefox displaying the website I’m working on, #4 – Text editor showing the codes of the website I’m working on.
No need to alt+tab through them, no need to access the task bar for a click. Just simply moving my mouse from one screen to the other.
But this dream will have to wait. 17″ LCDs are still pretty fucking expensive and getting 4 right now would amount to S$1500-2000. 2 capable SLI-enabled graphic cards, S$300-600. A whole new system just because my current motherboard doesn’t have PCI-e slots, $1000-2000.