Introduction

Someone asked me the other day if I thought SLI was just a marketing gimmick or a real technology that is actually worth considering. SLI is a great upgrade option for a lot of people, especially now with a large amount of SLI motherboards available for the impressive Intel Core 2 Duo processor lineup.

Generally unless you are buying top of the line graphics cards like the GeForce 8800GTS or GTX, going out and buying a pair of lower-end cards for SLI is not really what we would consider good value for money. What the extra dollars equate to means that you could get a faster single card solution and not have to worry about some games not supporting SLI. The technology is best when implemented with someone buying a card like the new GeForce 8600GTS today, and then three months down the track, when they have some extra dollars, add a second card into the mix.

That is in theory though. The 8600GTS in SLI might be sub-par, who knows? Well we do, and so will you by the end of this article or at least you should. Is the 8600GTS SLI worth looking at as an option for performance users who do not have a thick wallet at the moment or simply cannot find themselves saving?

Let us find out.