Hardware for Wrath

[Concillian]

Wasn't WoW one of the things that kept being mentioned in nVIDIA's driver release notes as not having any benefit from SLI?

I don't know, but SLI (or crossfire for ATi) is generally not worth it until you are to the point of needing more power than the top of the line cards. In pretty much every case you get more value out of a higher end single card than any two card implementation.

Given these high end cards are in the $400-500 range, there shouldn't be too many people considering these options. Especially when considering that motherboards and power supplies to support these multi-GPU configurations can add another $100-200 to the total system cost.

The 4870x2 seems to perform better than 4870 + 4870 in crossfire, so it probably doesn't have the same implications as crossfire.

People who have older cards may be tempted to go the SLI or crossfire route to potentially save money, but if you look at the Tom's benchmarks in the original post, you can see that this generally doesn't pan out.

For example, if you compare the 8600 GTS in SLI (currently as low as $50 each) you can see that even in crossfire, they don't come close to a 9600GT (can be had less than $100)