How does SLI work

[EHM-1651 Christian]

If you have a SLI compatible motherboard, can you use any type of gfx cars as long as it's the same??
Not any special cards supporting SLI???

[EHM-1703 Philip]

Christian,

As far as I am aware, you have two use identical Nvidia SLI compliant cards. (actually it's the GPU processor has to be identical so it could be the same GPU from two different manufacturers ie two Gforce 7950GTX cards, one from BFG and one from Gainward)

On the other hand you could buy any twin PCI-E x16 motherboard and use two ATI Crossfire cards which do not have to be identical, just one has to be a Crossfier Master card.

If you are looking for Direct X10 compatible crads, only Nvidia is in the market place at the moment although ATI/AMD are due to launch one by Christmas. DX10 will not be compatible with Windows XP so you will have to move to Vista when it is launched if you do want a DX10 system.

[EHM-1651 Christian]

I feel Microsft is going to put some presure on all of us to buy the Vista, since there is no possibily to you the best graphics in the future with older windows versions.
Like not making DX10 compatible with Windows XP.

I wondre how long it takes before Linux and other OS's start to grow at a higher rate???