Elte Bastards posted an article about the ForceWare 77.72 drivers

The release of NVIDIA's ForceWare 77.72 drivers brought us a couple of interesting prospects which go hand-in-hand with one another - GeForce 6600 users can now run two boards in an SLI configuration, and SLI mode can now work minus the inter-GPU 'Video Link' previously required.

With these intriguing facts in mind, we put this to test, pairing up a couple of GeForce 6600GT boards to see how they fared both with and without the SLI bridge connector.

With the release of the GeForce 7800 GTX earlier this week, the focus was understandably concentrated around the launch of this new high-end part. This excitement has, largely speaking, allowed the release of a set of drivers to accompany this new part to go unnoticed.

As well as support for NVIDIA's new board, ForceWare 77.72 includes some interesting features from an SLI standpoint, most notably the introduction of support for 'vanilla' GeForce 6600 boards. As any of you who have seen such a board will testify, these cards come without the SLI bridge connector which will be familiar to most of you. On top of this, NVIDIA have also stated that devices can now be run in SLI without using this bridge connector, albeit with reduced performance.

With this intriguing development in mind, we decided to take a couple of GeForce 6600GTs, pair them up in SLI mode, and see how they performed using this new driver set both with and without the SLI bridge connector attached. Other sites have tried this in the past using previous driver sets, with disappointing consequences, so will we have any better luck using ForceWare 77.72?

Bridging the gap - Running an SLI setup without bridge