SLI has been around for a few years and NVIDIA have pretty much been the driving force behind multi-GPU solutions since the inception of their SLI solution. Last year they tried to ramp it up a notch with Quad SLI, but this failed to impress enthusiasts, websites and pretty much the whole industry. Now they've brought in another crazy solution, namely Triple SLI or also called 3-Way SLI as technology. And well SLI is the marketing name for a way of using two or more graphics processors in parallel at the time. Using both the PCI Express bus and the proprietary SLI connector made by NVIDIA, the graphics cards communicate using dedicated scaling logic in each GPU. - Overclock3D

XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra 3-Way SLI Solutions Preview

Now SLI isn't perfrect, but it is improving as NVIDIA revise and re-work their drivers and algorithms to get the best out of the SLI technology. Most situations where SLI is supported we see a nice increase in gaming performance, although with unsupported games we do not see any at all, some even having a loss in performance. So Triple SLI works on the same precept as SLI, with three cards sharing the load. Unfortunately for the masses who went out and bought the excellent GeForce 8800 GT or GTS, 3-Way SLI supports only the GeForce 8800 GTX or Ultra meaning that only those will see the benefit of a Tri-SLI config.

The gaming experience with Tri-SLI was for the most part enjoyable. Crysis felt almost there in that it almost felt like the cards could push the frames but software was drawing the setup back. Now this is just us speculating, but we hope future driver revisions cure this. In addition to this, remember that the next generation NVIDIA cards that are Triple SLI enabled have had a lot of research and development gone into them to be able to work better, according to NVIDIA's partners, so here's to hoping. Triple SLI is a fantastic advance after the failure of Quad SLI technology somehow after the GeForce 7950 GX2 release.

The results are a lot better than we were expecting and we were impressed at some of the frame rates we got, even at this stage which we would definitely state is early days for Tri-SLI. Price is a huge concern, with three XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra's and an XFX nForce 780i SLI costing a whopping $2500 at the time of release, this technology really is only for those who really invest in their PC's. Couple those parts with a power supply that can run the rig, a CPU that doesn't hold it back too much, and an LCD capable of showing what Tri-SLI can do and you've got yourself a nice tidy $5000 computer system.

However, Triple SLI and SLI in general has always been a place that has cost a lot of money. The budget SLI setups aren't worth paying for over a faster single card and the top end ones cost a bomb. We suppose the point of Tri-SLI really is that is shows off what NVIDIA can do. Driver updates should fix a few issues and the new GeForce 9800 series should produce some more compatible cards than we see now. Is Triple SLI worth the money? We don't think so right now. It's a fantastic technology demo and a fun toy for the rich, but it's not a practical graphics solution for even your well off enthusiast.