[MisterBenn]

I'm reasonably inclined to agree with Fyron. I had a couple of SLI systems in the past - a pair of GeForce 2s years ago, and my last system had a couple of 7800GTs. For starters I didn't really consider the benefit of the second card to be worth it either time.

Secondly, with the 7800s I had a driver issue. At some point in time during the life of the drivers, nVidia added some additional SLI rendering options into the driver, such as options for AFR/AFR2/SFR etc. From that driver onwards, I was never able to use them with my SLI set-up. I would have rampant artifacts and consistent crashing until I either disabled the second card or reverted the driver version once again. I trawled the forums, and tried every service pack, system driver update and driver cleaner going and always had the same results.

I had to stick with the previous driver version, and in the end I was still trying to survive with it when it was 18 months old! The newest games often had quirks and were not well optimised for the old drivers as I'm sure you guys are aware is common with aged unified drivers and current releases. Reading the forums, I was not alone and my system was hardly an obscure one (AMD64 based).

In hindsight, my opinion is that with the unified driver strategy that both ATI and nVidia operate, it is the safest bet to have an extremely common GPU architecture to get the best support. With aging GPUs and "rarer" configurations such as SLI setups, the amount that driver releases cater for your issues dries up quick quickly. When building my last system, I opted for a simple life and just bought a single, fast card - I have become conservative in my old age! I mainly want my system to be reliable so that I know it's going to be ready to go when I sit down to use it...