2 sli connectors on the 8800gtx wtf?

why are there 2 sli connectors on the 8800gtx?? ive been gone for like a month and everything changes...but the sli connectors were there since launch though

theres no quad sli mobos...only some of the 680is have tri pci express slots

help iam lost here

You misunderstand what he was writing about.
Actual SLi connectors, not the misnomered power connection.

so one is for physics...swweet...i wish you could get a like 7600gt and use that for physics instead of going out and buying another realllllllly expensive card to match your sli setup

No actually it's for unbound chains.

The original SLi on the GF6 & 7 only allowed 2 way communication along 1 path, thus the GX2 was not really quad SLi, but SLi+SLi, that was actually a limitation on the chip. there was no such limitation to ATi's solution (nor their previous solutions like the E&S simfusion [which allowed up to 32sets of cards in a rack mount system]).

Now neither the R600 nor the GF8 are limited, and quad SLi/Xfire are quite easily possible whic true point to point communication between the chips (without going through the PCIe lanes). This also allows faster card to card communication by doubling the throughput. However moreoften than not these connectors aren't really saturated, they are mainly used to control the cards.

Now while ATi has mentioned support for Quad Xfire, and nvidia has already demoed their bastardized version of 'quad', the interesting concept is the idea nV was mentioning of asymetric SLi involving 4 cards, but 1 for physics, and 3 for graphics, and then the ability to adjust tha based on needs. So no physics, quad SLi, some physics, tri (asymetric) SLi, heavy physics, dual Physics cards, and dual graphics.

Alot of it is still sketchy, with only leaks and such, but the gist of it is that now there are no physical limitations for SLi/Xfire in greater numbers tha 2, and while this may be big for us, the largest impact may be in the workstation and GPGPU fields, howvwer there's been little said there too, and I doubt we'll see any of it until the R600, and GF8900 and G80-GX2 variants hit so the competition can size each other up. Also the drivers are likely far from ready for both companies, we know the current state of VistsaSLi, and I doubt Quad for either company would fair much better at first, but I sure would love to see some serious use of that super tiling with more than just 2 cards.

I thought current mobos were limited to 20 pcie lanes. which is why dual x16 slots really only run in x8 mode? So single x16 slot and some x1's. Else same but 2 x16 which run x16 when only one slot is used. X38 chipset due this fall with PCIe 2.0 is supposed to have dual x16 running both at x16. (and twice the data rate at 1.0 for four times the bandwidth running to your SLI/Xfire setup) does 680i do true x16 SLI/Xfire now?

Pfft, nah, Oblivion doesn't need that kinda speed, whereas Tetris and Pong need it for my mad skillz!

Just a thought but since there are two SLI connections, say you want to do normal SLI with the 8800GTX, if you use an SLI bridge to connect them to each other can you use two SLI bridges? would that increase performance at all, the way i think it would is because the cards are now "doubled linked" sharing information could be a lot faster.