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Big Bang II is codename for ForceWare Release 180 or R180. The biggest improvement is the introduction of SLI multi-monitor. Yes, you’ve read it correctly, Nvidia has finally allowed more than one monitor to use multiple video cards at once, something it’s been trying to do since SLI’s introduction back in 2004.

From the nvidia 180 driver release:

*Note: The following SLI features are only supported on Windows Vista: Quad SLI technology using GeForce 9800 GX2, 3-way SLI technology, Hybrid SLI, and SLI multi-monitor support.

Even the SLI Zone (an official nvidia site set up for the 180 release) page for multi monitors states:

System requirements > Microsoft® Windows® Vista 32-bit or 64-bit

Now if you're right and some mythical nvidia driver exists that supports dual monitors on Windows XP, just link to it. Or even a single article or forum post explaining how to make it work. Even if it means rolling back my drivers, I will do it and I will come back here and say "thank you Khyber, thank you for showing me the way, even though you were kind of a dick about it."

That's of course totally disregarding the fact that I shouldn't have to roll back my drivers and lose out on all the driver improvements and bugfixes from the last four years that make half the games I own playable. All of which leads right back to my original point, which is that SLI is more trouble than it's worth. Have a look through the bugfix section of almost any nvidia driver release and there will be an entire section devoted to SLI-only bugfixes.

In hindsight, instead of spending 10-20 hours over the last five years trying to get dual monitors to work, struggling with new games that crash constantly due to SLI bugs, driver updates and rollbacks, reinstalls, whatever, I should have just taken on 10-20 hours of additional paid work, which would have easily paid for a new video card every two years, saving me the massive hassle.

Oh and your "raw photographic evidence" is some random photo with a single display running XP? Are those other displays supposed to be connected to the same box? Is the box even running SLI with all the displays attached to the same card? I don't know because there's no fucking way for me to tell.

1) design SSDs with a longer lifespan

.There are also applications, where SSDs are significantly slower. For example small write performance is really bad.

There are also applications where poorly designed SSDs are significantly slower. This post : http://forums.slizone.com/index.php?showtopic=34943 summarizes the problem revealed by anandtech there : http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403.

since an SSD has no moving platter, there is no difference between sequential and random read/writes.

Yes but many cheaper ssd based on MLC cells *do* have problems with random writes so that they perform, at times, worse than a conventional hard drive. This post : http://forums.slizone.com/index.php?showtopic=34943 summarizes the problem revealed by anandtech there : http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403.

Btw, a good read on what some of the bad things could be for them.

http://forums.slizone.com/index.php?showtopic=29361

Uh?

My Dell 30" LCD screens are 2560x1600 pixels (each), which is almost 1.5 million more pixels than this screen. Even my MacBook Pro can drive simple games in that resolution and using any new graphic card in two or three way SLI will let you run state of the art graphics in those resolutions.

Extreme example (3-way SLI): http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone_3waysli.html

But SLI works pretty well in parallel.

Put four awesome GPUs in a box and let them render 1/4 of the screen and you are in great shape, so maybe my 2600x1600 with 4x AA is totally possible.

http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone_quadsli.html

I personally don't mind having to fake reflection and shadow effects to some extent, as long as you get decent FPS and resolution without jaggies...

The question is though (having not RTFA yet): will this work on Linux, and what boards offer four PCI-E x16 slots?

I can't say one way or the other about Linux (yet). You don't need four PCI-E x16 slots though. This is based around the nVidia 7950 GX2, which connects two graphics processors to the motherboard via a single PCI-E slot. Each of those takes up two slots worth of space (in fact,it's two boards connected together) but the high-end single-GPU boards (e.g. 7900GTX, ATI X1900) do so as well. Most SLI motherboards leave quite a bit of room between their x16 slots, so the physical installation should rarely (if ever) cause a problem.

In case anybody cares: apparently during development, they did build a few dual-GPU boards that required two slots -- but they were never put into real production.

One more reason to buy an overpriced video card instead of an overpriced CPU?

What do you mean an overpriced video card, and why would you want one instead of an overpriced CPU?!

Here's a link to nvidia's site on sli technology
http://www.slizone.com/page/slizone_learn.html

SLI boosts video performance by using two graphics cards for one monitor. Initially touted as being able to drastically increase video performance (frames per second/anti aliasing/anisotropic filtering) users soon found that SLI was only useful for boosting the performance of high resolution monitors (past 1280x1024). In fact, having an SLI setup for 1280x1024 or less will decrease your performance compared to having just one of those cards since the time necessary to divide the gpu workload starts to have an adverse affect with lower resolutions.

Most people who shop for video cards now advocate avoiding SLI, since it is cheaper to by a more expensive graphic card than buying two graphics cards one generation down (a single 7800gt will outperform 2x6800gts in SLI and a single 7800gtx will even outperform 2x7800gt's).

this isn't the same sli that 3dfx had. this strieght from the sli faq on slizone.com

"How does this technology differ from 3dfx's SLI? NVIDIA SLI differs in many ways. First, 3dfx SLI was implemented on a shared bus using PCI. The PCI bus delivered ~100MB/sec. of bus throughput, while PCI Express is a point-to-point interface that can deliver ~60x the total bandwidth of PCI. Second, 3dfx SLI performed interleaving of scan lines, and combined in the analog domain, which could result in image quality issues due to DAC differences and other factors. 3dfx Voodoo technology also only performed triangle setup, leaving the geometry workload for the CPU, hence 3dfx SLI only scaled simple texture fill rate, and then used inter-frame scalability. NVIDIA SLI technology is PCI Express based, uses a completely digital frame combining method that has no impact on image quality, can scale geometry performance, and supports a variety of scalability algorithms to best match the scalability method with application demands."