ONE BIG CoProcessor, Please.

When You look at Multi Card Stats, 1=1, 2=1.5 & 3=1.75. Think about it, you pay for three, yet get less than 2 in performance, how good is entire fundumental system design?.

300 watts for game card is LOT & Much of that power is spent running controllers almost 1/3 foot from coprocessor, MEANING VOLTAGE DROP. meaning BAD quality (variant) signal & slowness, in effect..

How about it. ONE BIG GPU Card or bunch o' gpu on ONE BIG card, NOT Bunch of cards, using power needlessly & getting less than good performance as addmendium of score, thru labrynth of controllers & integrated coprocessors, that cann't cut it..

NONE of that Technology will carry over well to single slot behemouth, its just lot of monies piffed away on dialogue.

Great/OK for X58, BAD on GPU makers, whom are skirting true abilities of FAST system for large screens & simply gimping public for monies.. Those gpu are approaching billion transistors & its time to push one to Limit.
drashek one eyed slot begger..

NV going after the board manufacturers

It looks like NVidia finally gave up on getting Intel to pay for an SLI license. Instead, they're now licensing it on a per-board basis. Since the board manufacturers don't have the clout of Intel, they're much easier to extract money from.

I expect most manufacturers will have a "non-SLI" board and a "SLI enabled board", which would be identical except for the price and the SLI license. I also expect that shortly after the release, there will be patches developed so that the non-SLI board (or perhaps any board, X58 or not) will work in SLI.

mmm Step Back

Whence one realises the G84/G86 debacle will cost zilllions and sees that a bridge chip mafiose application a la skulltrail is counter-productive, one applies the golden handshake approach.

Shame the drivers aren't as good as some others to scale multi-gpu and there's no sideport enhancement on a dual card single slot job.

All this talk of Cuda on 2xx and a drop down to sell a few extra parts for X58 - shows desperacy after dominancy.

The end of nVidia chipsets?

Probably.

Still waiting for a sensible dual GPU solution...

Honestly, I have never liked SLI and Crossfire. Huge power consumption, you don't get the full use of both cards, has to be fixed in a per-game basis, etc.... even when SLI/Crossfire is built into the cards (the X2 boards) it doesn't fully scale to what the cards are suppose to deliver.

The big wigs talk and talk how their chip designs are scalable, well, they really are not. Scalable designs, a really well designed one, would at least be able to accommodate multiple GPUs that share the buffer memory and, even better, look like a single board card to the OS.

Anything else is really a hack job.

@Magius : totally agree

You hit it on the nail, as far as I'm concerned.
I have never seen any SLI benefit that could justify the price and running cost.
On top of that, SLI has always been a dicey business, and the drivers have often been quite buggy, whereas a single card rarely has any trouble.
I have always bought the highest-end card I could afford, and all I ever need to do is wait a year or a year and a half, and the next version does just as well as the previous did in SLI.
Tri-SLI ? What a joke !

Sure, if I had money to burn, I'd be happy to set up a monster rig just for kicks. While I'm dreaming, I'd also have an Aston Martin.