How much you’ll benefit from these two different setups will depend on what exactly you want to do with your computer. In theory, SLi links two different graphics processors together to boost the graphics capabilities of your computer, but in reality, there are a more limited number of scenarios where you’ll see any real benefit. If you typically run your games in lower resolution and don’t use anti-aliasing, you’ll see little to no benefit from using SLi; you really see the benefit when you go into resolutions beyond 1280×1024, and start cranking up the anti-aliasing level. So if you stick with lower resolutions, you’ll get more oomph from the brand new single 8800 card…but you’ll have to pay extra for it.

If you’re more interested in running in super high resolutions with anti-aliasing cranked up, you’ll definitely get more graphics power per dollar by linking up two lower-end cards with SLi. (The 8800GTX cards are running $700 and up APIECE, while you can get a PAIR of 7900s for about $300 if you look around for the best price.) The one thing you really want to consider when doing this, however, is that a pair of SLi cards running on the PCI Express bus will pretty much eat up all of your card slots, because you can’t put anything in between them, and many of the cards are double-width. The single higher-end cards at least have the benefit of compactness!