Didn't Gigabyte do this last year?

All you need now is your nuclear power supply supplying millions of watts of power. All you need is some plutonium and you are set to go.

"delivering ridiculous framerates all the way up to 2560x1600."

That's not a framerate, that's a resolution.

Or were you trying to say that the system would push ridiculous framerates at resolutions up to 2560x1600?

Does anyone else still think that even Dual SLI in the first place is pretty rediculous, especially in terms of the ratio of cost to performance?

I can afford an SLI setup but that doesn't mean I'm going to throw several hundred extra dollars at hardware companies for a few extra frames.

Have fun dropping over $5K on something that's's going to be beaten by a single card in 9 months. This whole multi-card thing is an annoying trend. It's expensive, kludgy, and temporary. Again, give it 9 months and this expensive pain-in-the-ass setup will be bested by a single next-gen card. It reminds me of the first time all of this started happening in the late 90's.

yeah, the performance to cost ratio is the only thing that's ridiculous! a few extra frames is right!
and yeah, a single card will beat it out in less than a year..

but really, is this SLI garbage really that mainstream(ads everywhere)? who can afford to blow so much for so little? and why don't nvidia and ati instead create cards with two or more gpus instead? sort of like that behemoth 3dlabs workstation card.

This is what companies do when their current chipsets can't handle modern gaming. Look at the actual performance increases for most games under SLI. Its slow has hell because the game actually has to support SLI to take full advantage. Even the games that support SLI don't always turn up that great of an advantage.

SLI died a long time ago with the Voodoo2 SLI daughter cards because chipsets came out that could give the same performance without the daughter cards. Its been reborn because modern games running at modern resolutions and depths are kicking our video cards asses. The stupid thing about this whole quad SLI or even SLI in general is that they can put all these GPUs on one card and get the exact same performance as all seperate cards. Which would you want?

Multi-card SLI is the same as multi-cpu systems. As technology progresses you'll see everything move to multiple cores on the same chip (we're already seeing this with intel and amd) and GPUs won't be excluded.

Personally I hope that nvidia has something better on the horizon in the 8xxx series or whatever their going to call it cuz I'm unimpressed with the numbers I've seen with the 7xxx line. We can probably blame the game manufacturers for that.

Kilo: The reason is pretty simple, no one in their right mind would spend ~$1000 on a single video card that boasts 2x performance, however the marketing people can get people to believe with 2 cards they get twice the performance and can sell the cards at $500 each.

People see two as better than one in all cases. They don't realize that they could have the same or better performance for less money if they would include something similar to this on one card.

BUT can it play F.E.A.R.?

From my understanding, running in Quad SLI will not benefit you over Dual SLI in single application/display gaming.

Your computer will utilize two of the video cards to run the primary display, and two cards for your secondary display. Few games allow you to play on two displays, even fewer work well on dual diplays. Games like Half Life 2 will have the aiming reticule in the center of the two displays.

I have a feeling that the whole notion of Quad SLI will become impulse buyer's remorse.

Thats why you need to use 3 monitors. Hell I've been using a matrox tripple head for a while. I only wish ATI or NV would do the same with a modern card.