Anandtech brings the first independent benchmarks for NVIDIA's SLI technology which requires of a dual PCI Express motherboard. Tests were performed on a pre-release nForce4 SLI board from MSI using dual GeForce 6600GT and 6800 GT cards, results did not disappoint.
Building a dual videocard machine from scratch will easily become an expensive project, where the SLI concept really shines though is when you consider the upgrade potential it gives for the future, being able to boost gaming performance when needed (and at a lower cost in the long run). Anand tests were limited to a few popular games running at higher resolutions with AA enabled. Under those conditions, both 6600 and 6800 cards escalated extremely well giving from 40 to 80% performance boost when the second card was added.
According to the report, drivers supporting the SLI feature in Nvidia cards still need some work, graphical glitches were apparent during the benchmarking session, hopefully most of those will be gone by retail launch before the end of the year.