When Nvidia launched its nForce 680i SLI chipset in October 2006, some boards based on the part were seen to sport three PCI Express x16 graphics card slots. A year on, it now seems that Nvidia may at least be ready to release three-way SLI on the world.

A confidential Nvidia presentation slide posted last week by Chinese-language website Expreview describes three-way SLI as "the new ultimate gaming platform". The cards linked by a special connector that straddles all three boards, allowing only one video cable to be used, to hook up the rig to a monitor.

The slide says that Nvidia's top-of-the-line GeForce 8800 Ultra and 8800 GTX graphics cards will be the first to support the technology, which will indeed be hosted by nForce 680i motherboards.

Nvidia already offers a four-card version of SLI, Quad SLI, which essentially takes two SLI card pairs and... well... pairs them up, a process that requires two separate SLI connectors. The three-way version appears to use a single connector, and operates with GeForce 8-series GPUs rather than the 7-series boards Quad SLI launched with.

TRI SLI, anyone?