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. ...