14 DAY TRIAL // As we are close to the end of the year, Nvidia has pulled another surprise from its sleeve. Unfortunately, an unpleasant one. Bad news for those who have been waiting to see the GeForce 8800 GT support triple-SLI multi-GPU technology.
The company's public relations department had denied what the head Jen-Hsun Huang stated a while ago, that consumers would be able to install three of such boards into a single personal computer, to squeeze bits and bytes for improved rendering performance. "Simple typo/slip on his part? The plans haven't changed," said Derek Perez, public relations director at Nvidia.
"From [two GeForce] 8800 GT [graphics cards], you could obviously do SLI and soon you'll be able to do three-way SLI, so you are going to be able to put a lot of GPU horsepower into your system, starting with a very affordable 8800 GT, and so - this is our focus for now," said Jen-Hsun Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia.
It seems that it was him that made a mistake when mentioning the triple-SLI, unavailable for now on a 8800 GT configuration. The only cards to support three-linked SLI are the high-end offerings GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra, but, in an attempt at squeezing performance, the buyers would squeeze their pockets, as these cards retail for $599 and $849, respectively.
The GeForce 8800 GT model is provided with only a single MIO interface connector, which would normally mean that a pair connection can only be done with two cards, not three. The GTX and Ultra series come with two MIO connectors per card and give the user the possibility to connect two, three, four or even more graphics cards between each other - the maximum number of connections is reached when there's no free slot to plug another card in.
AMD already promised to introduce triple- and quad-GPU configurations with its CrossFire X technology for their Radeon HD 3850/3870 graphics cards that can be purchased at the same price as Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GT.