SLI question with GTX 295

I'm pretty new to the world of SLI. I've never needed to mess with it up until this point so have mercy if there is a simple answer.

A good friend of mine is an architect and creates 3D models and video walkthroughs of his buildings he designs. He wants to experiment with creating his videos in full HD and is in serious need of a high end machine for all his 3D and rendering work. Money is not much of an issue with him and has asked me to put together a machine for him. I have been aware of the SLI technology for some time now and knew that this guy would be a perfect candidate for a video monster.

I have several questions before I take the plunge with someone else's money. First here is what I'm putting together. An ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution motherboard maxed out on RAM, 3 ASUS EN-GTX295 graphics cards, and an Intel i7 940 processor. Is there a limit to how many graphics cards you can SLI together? I was thinking about doing all 3 since the MB has 3 PCI-E 16x slots. How significant of a performance loss is there if you run dual monitors? He has two 25 inch monitors that he would like to run at as high a resolution as possible (1920x1200). Would I run into any SLI issues with a 64 bit system or does that not make any difference?

AFAIK, you can only SLI 2 295's since they each have 2 GPUs and NVIDIA's drivers only support up to 4 GPUs in SLI. I highly recommend reading this article before putting anything together: http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] ,2123.html

not a bad thought. i had the same thought late last night and i found myself looking at a few of the different quadro cards out there. thanks for the help.

Looks about right, most `professional` cards are based on `gaming` cores, the main difference is the drivers and some tweaks to the pcb.
My point, was this: For an architect, or any other professional, time is very much money. Few of us would dream of spending thousands on a mere graphics card, but for such people, that is an unimportaint; Project deadlines have to be met and they are often tight and nobody is going to be happy missing out on a contract worth millions because a slow graphics card prevented the company (or person) from delivering a good presentation on time.