sideband memory on the motherboard and overclocking the igp get much more result (j&w say the managed 2975 in 3d)

also forget the be series, the athlon 4850 at 45w or phenom 9150e at 65w will give a big boost (don't forget phenom comes with ht 3.0 which doubles the speed)

...cheap and cool. now, if they can just get linux graphics drivers on any distro other than Suse or Redhat, they can have the cash for my next machine.

If hybrid crossfire is effective in using integrated graphics for the windows desktop, etc, and only enabling the graphics card for gaming - that'd be significant power savings and justify the usage of hybrid crossfire in a way your article did not cover.

I think that's the angle nVidia are taking with their incarnation of Hybrid Crossfire, imaginatively named Hybrid SLI. Specifically the bit called HybridPower.

That and the Vista-only requirement make me think it is simply a feature of DX10.1 that both houses are trying to market as original.

</cynical>

A cheap multimonitor machine, right? With both inboard and dedicated graphics you can run up to 4 monitors with no multiplexers. We could use this for some workstations on our company.

its still the 8800GT all the way ?