Enter Asus with its brand new Extreme GeForce 7800 GT Dual. This monster of a graphics chip sports two 7800 GT chips running in parallel. We'd like to note a few things that are special about this card. First, only 2000 samples of this my-card-is-faster-than-your-card graphics board exist, worldwide. Second, the THG lab received two of them. Third, although the cards lack the usual SLI connectors, two of these monsters can nonetheless be combined via SLI. That means we can now achieve Quad SLI with four GeForce 7800 GT chips and a total of 1 GB of video memory.

The cards don't draw their power from the system's power supply, but rather their own little power bricks, which are attached via the cards' ATX shields - if these aren't connected, the system won't boot. The second hurdle is the driver; only the 77.77 graphics driver from Asus (found on the CD) will get the cards up and running. Installing NVIDIA's reference driver instead will handicap the SLI configuration - only one chip on one of the cards will actually run. Additionally, only one card should be installed at first. If the drivers have been installed and the card is running correctly, Windows won't display a BSOD - which is always good news.