Techreport has a nice preview of an upcoming Via chipset that supports 8X PCIe x 2 or SLI like. Not the new 16x2 but rather 16x1 + 4x1. Thing is they have a nice mid range set of solutions coming from S3 called MultiChrome which are about equivalent to 6600GTs and prior to the X1800XT PE have the fastest GPY clock on earth of 700MHz. The cards will have 8 vertex shaders and will work in Bridgeless SLI(Like) with u to 3 cards with little performance hit for using the PCIe bus unlike SLI or Crossfire. Anyways whats interesting about this chipset is it will allow you to run 2 Nvidia cards in SLI.. yuh head right, in the review they tested 2 6800Ultras with an older driver (that did not check for chipset) and it worked identically to Nvidia's SLI chipset... cool huh. Now to get a hacked Crossfire driver and try that too. Well anyways tis worth a read and could be a really nice mid range solution early next year.
http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2005q4/via-k8t900/index.x?pg=1
