To begin, $550 is a lot of money to spend. If you're already planning to purchase an SLI motherboard and a pair of GeForce 6600 GT cards, the Gigabyte package is right up your alley. If you divide it up, the motherboard - a highly recommended piece of equipment - costs about $200 and each GeForce 6600 GT is costing $175. However, you'll be going into the deal knowing that the combination is generally slower than the nForce4 Ultra motherboard and GeForce 6800 GT card that you could pick up for roughly the same price.

The other slight caveat is that your multi-monitor support will be fairly constrained. As it is, SLI will always limit you to one display output. If you had two graphics cards, you could disable SLI and use up to four monitors. But because the 3D1 has two outputs, that'll be your ceiling with the technology disabled.

Finally, Gigabyte's 3D1 is a great performer. Granted, it never doubles the performance of a single GeForce 6600 GT graphics card. It does come close in many situations though, especially at the high resolutions that gamers demand. In the worst cases, Gigabyte's 3D1 will make one extra resolution playable with eye-candy enabled. So, if you had a 6600 GT that topped out at 1024x768 with 4xAA turned on, there's a good chance that the 3D1 will handle 1280x1024 without a problem. In the very best cases, the 3D1 will approach, and even surpass, the performance of a single GeForce 6800 GT card.