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ATI speaks about SLI

ATI speaks about SLI

Written by John Yan on 9/14/2004 for
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Recently we interviewed Steve Sims at NVIDIA about SLI. With Alienware producing their own multi video card technology, I was curious to see what ATI thought of both approaches.

While on the phone with ATI, I asked Public Relations Manager, Patricia Mikula, about NVIDIA’s SLI solution. She had reservations on NVIDIA’s take citing the problems that can arise if the board revisions or BIOSes are different. Would a card bought today work with a card bought three months later? And if it’s a mainstream solution, would a mainstream customer be able to troubleshoot the problems that can appear?

What about boards that are from different manufactures? Would they work correctly in SLI mode? Patricia also has reservations in the fact that the video cards are much more complicated today than they were when the 3DFx cards were out supporting SLI. She also stated that by the time you purchase the two cards and the expensive motherboards needed along with a high end power supply, you’d probably be better off spending the money on a single high-end card.

Between NVIDIA and Alienware’s offerings in multi-card solutions, she thinks Alienware has it right with their Video Array system. Alienware has the ability to engineer a system with the capacity to deal with heat and power requirements. And if there are problems, you have one point of contact instead of trying to deal with say the motherboard manufacturer or the video card manufacturer or even the dealer you purchased the components from. But as far as SLI being mainstream with the 6800 GT series, she thinks that part of the public is not ready.

If we get more responses from various other vendors, we'll be sure to post their comments.

* The product in this article was sent to us by the developer/company.


About Author

I've been reviewing products since 1997 and started out at Gaming Nexus. As one of the original writers, I was tapped to do action games and hardware. Nowadays, I work with a great group of folks on here to bring to you news and reviews on all things PC and consoles.

As for what I enjoy, I love action and survival games. I'm more of a PC gamer now than I used to be, but still enjoy the occasional console fair. Lately, I've been really playing a ton of retro games after building an arcade cabinet for myself and the kids. There's some old games I love to revisit and the cabinet really does a great job at bringing back that nostalgic feeling of going to the arcade.

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