As you know from the rumors around the web, NVIDIA is launching 3-Way SLI. And darn, there hardly is a secret for anything released by NVIDIA these days. Over a six weeks ago we started planning our 3-Way SLI article, yet due to some very dark circumstances less than a day prior to the launch, we received our boards. For the last year, if you had a closer look at the GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra, you'd notice there's a second SLI connector and to date there has been a lot of speculation about that extra connector, to name one, it could have been an extension for physics over a third card. But it is all more simple, meaning to get a full working 3-Way SLI configuration. - Guru3D

XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra 3-Way SLI Multi-GPU Review

But now you go, didn't we have Quad SLI already? And yes we did, and it miserably failed due to a plethora of factors. In the end Quad SLI was killed off due to a DirectX 9.0c backbuffer limitation which pretty much hindered games to utilize more than 2 GPU's, and from thereon a lack of driver development. NVIDIA tried to evangelize this with sexy anti-aliasing modes running over the 3rd and 4th GPU, yet it never took off. Pretty sour if you bought two of the GeForce 7950 GX2 cards at that time. But if you do still have them, you guys might actually benefit from the driver development of 3-Way SLI as well.

So not only did NVIDIA plan to refresh its lineup of performance graphics accelerators this year, but also intended to introduce its 3-Way SLI multi-GPU technology. Initially NVIDIA plans to enable triple SLI support for the top of the range GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra graphics cards, but eventually it may support 3-Way SLI configurations of other GPU's as well, and with rumors of these cards reach end of life soon, they'd better. Systems with three graphics cores will be powered by nForce 680i as well as nForce 780i platforms with the former supporting PCI Express 1.1, whereas the latter featuring PCI Express 2.0.

Now this is something you will need. Expect vendors like XFX to sell the new SLI connector separately if you already have a nForce 680i board. If you purchase the soon to be released nForce 780i mainboard, it will be included, both the 2-Way and 3-Way SLI connectors. NVIDIA has been working really hard on the new 3-Way SLI drivers, and from the look of it, this technology is here to stay. Installation is fairly easy, insert the cards, place the SLI dongle on the SLI fingers and boot into windows. After the installation is completed browse to the SLI tab in the NVIDIA control panel.

All we where able to show you was the overall scaling performance among a bunch of popular cards. Also, we really wanted to look at higher anti-aliasing modes versus performance more in-depth. But we had less than a day to manage this entire article. A small pointer if you actually plan 3-Way SLI, get loads and loads of cooling in your PC. We have our PC side window open at all times for the taking pictures. Unfortunately that also blocks ambient airflow in the system. When you have a high-end system and then add three pretty hot graphics cards, you're bound to run into some kind of issue.

So let there be no doubt, 3-Way SLI works, plain and simple. You will however run into a couple of games that hardly benefit from it, so CPU limited games. When your processor can't communicate it's data fast enough towards the graphics card driver, the cards can't render any faster. Now with newer games that's just not the entirely the case. Some games however need to be optimized to take full effect of the 3-Way SLI technology. Other than that we can say where every there is a serious GPU limitation, 3-Way SLI will kick in nicely. The new 3-Way SLI implementation in the drivers actually works really sweet.