Bang for the Buck

[Kevin]

Does anyone seriously think SLI is going to take off?  I think it's a nifty thing, but I really don't see any future for it outside of the hardcore niche market.  I really can't see any average gamer dropping down the cash for a pair of 6800 Ultras, when just a single one will play any game on the market at the highest resolution and at maximum texture details.  And when a single 6800 Ultra becomes outdated, there will be another generation of cards that will play the current games without requiring SLI.  I think it will always be more practical to buy a single next-generation card than to add another card to a SLI system.

But then again, playing Half Life 2 with a pair of SLI 6800 Ultras on a 22" widescreen LCD at a ridiculously high resolution with ridiculously high texture detail would be pretty sexy.
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SLI was big for 3DFx it really did help drive sales and it was one of the major pieces of IP that NVidia was after when they bought up 3Dfx a few years back (the other biggies being some of the AA and ansio stuff that 3Dfx had developed as well and several other smaller IP's). The current implementations on PCIe are not as slap and go friendly as the older PCI set-ups were, but they also are higher quality and performance (those external hook-up cables where a good place to get signal interferance). I don't strongly recommend it and you can save money on the mobo by not going for it, but it is something to think about.

Other economic situations where it can make sense is if you are maintaining 2 or more systems (you have a gamer spouse). In that case you are buying a pair of cards quite often. Here you can get the two 6800's and put one in each box. A year and a half to two years later you can get one new single card solution and put it in one box and SLI that other to keep them up (assuming SLI stays around). Sure the now 2 carded box might not have DX11 support only DX10, but it can help on the econ side some. Of course you maybe looking at a new mobo for new bus and chip interfaces at that stage so it might not work. But that is still a very few people in that situation.

Though really in the desktop market it is more of a power builders option like you said. Of course it doesn't really hurt to have 2 16x PCIe slots on a board though right now it doesn't really help either (except for SLI options). Everything is eventually going to migrate to PCIe, it's just a better architecture. I'm just waiting for the SLI workstation cards and boards. With 4 proccessor Opteron boards out there and 8 Opteron boards on the way it would be sweet to SLI a couple of Quadro cards in there, that would be a workstation with some processing and graphical horsepower. Though NVidia hasn't made any SLI enable workstation card yet. Rumor mills suggest they will.