NVIDIA SLI Certification Program - Why You Should Care

What this all boils down to is that NVIDIA wants to make any user’s transition to SLI a relatively painless one. SLI is initially aimed at the high end enthusiast where money is not an issue, but a second category of users will also find SLI attractive. Not everyone wants to drop $800 to $1200 for two top-of-the-line video cards, but if they settle for spending an extra $50 on the motherboard they will have the ability to place that second card in the machine sometime in the future (when prices have either gone down, or they have saved enough money to purchase that second card).

This is a very cost effective way to achieve the next level of performance without having to buy that next generation card when it comes out. Currently the best value in this type of program would be with the 6800 GT products, as they are widely available now, and in six to eight months they should be in the mid $250 range. At that time the user can buy one of those and get performance nearly equal to a 32 pixel pipeline/12 vertex shader video card with a 512 bit memory controller running 1 GHz DDR3. The only requirement for SLI is that the user has video cards from the same generation and chip level (eg. you shouldn’t mix and match a 6800 GT with a 6600 GT, or a 6800 Ultra with a 6800 GT).

Oddly enough, the first product to receive SLI certification is the Alienware Area-51 ALX X2 system, which is based on the Intel Xeon/Tumwater platform. This is somewhat of a “one off” situation, and I doubt we will see certification for another Intel based SLI system anytime soon. NVIDIA hopes to have SLI systems based on the nForce 4 architecture available by the end of this month.

In conclusion, this is not a marketing gimmick from NVIDIA. It is a genuine program that will benefit the user a great deal by making sure that any product they buy with “NVIDIA SLI” or “NVIDIA SLI Ready” attached will give them a good experience. This program will continually develop, and NVIDIA’s hopes that anything with the certification can be put together in multiple configurations and work as advertised.

NVIDIA SLI Certification Program - Why You Should Care@ Penstarsys