SLI Bridges are thrown in with compatible motherboards and there is usually little reason to want anything else. They work. There is no performance advantage for getting a "better" one, unless it does not connect with your specific arrangement of two-to-four cards. Today, NVIDIA gives another reason: a soft, beautiful glow to match the green "GeForce GTX" on the cards themselves.
Mind you, this is not the first glowing SLI Bridge. EVGA even provided us with a few of their own for a giveaway last year.
NVIDIA has three models, depending on the layout of your cards. 3-way SLI will need to be arranged as a series of two-wide with no gaps, using the "3-Way SLI Bridge". 2-way configurations have the choice of two empty slots between the two-wide cards, or no gap; former would purchase the "2-Way Spaced SLI Bridge" and the later, the "2-Way SLI Bridge". They each require GeForce GTX 770 cards, or better, as well as a recent GeForce Experience (1.7+). Certain non-reference designs may be incompatible.
The SLI Bridges are available now. Both 2-Way bridges are $29.99 and the 3-Way is $39.99.
The GeForce logo on the
The GeForce logo on the bridges looks more like 3 green bananas than the GeForce logo. There isn’t enough black between the greens. At least on the above pictures.
I think Nvidia’s own logo would have been a much better idea.
3 Green bananas ha ha ha
3 Green bananas ha ha ha
I’d rather have SLI over PCIe
I’d rather have SLI over PCIe like AMD.
I’m by no means an expert,
I’m by no means an expert, but I would think the bridge connectors give NVIDIA a measure of control over the quality of SLI. They can’t be sure there aren’t unintended latencies introduced by poor motherboard design or other factors, so connecting the cards together directly ensures a certain level of consistency.
Then Nvidia’s quality control
Then Nvidia’s quality control isn’t very good. AMD was able to pull it off with XDMA with results that are not only great, but better (less stutter) than previous CF and current SLI setups.
After going with dual 3GB
After going with dual 3GB 670s for the past two yeras, I think I may choose to go single card this next time around (that might not be for awhile as I don’t expect there to be a single card that is twice as powerful as a pair of 670s until the end of 2016, at least).
I have a massive Cosmos II chassis and even with that, it is damned difficult to fit a pair (or more) of cards in it *plus* a massive high end HS+F like the Noctua… which I spent $100 on, only to find it wouldn’t share the enormous chassis without damaging one of the GPUs.
That said, it would be nice to have an SLI bridge other than the flimsy little ribbon, in the case.
To hell with the power bill-
To hell with the power bill- when are they going to have a quad?