The Issue

PC Gaming enthusiasts have been building rigs on their own for years and Nvidia, a manufacturer of graphics cards, or GPUs, has been at the forefront of helping such enthusiasts build powerful and amazing systems for a long time.

Disappointment of limiting to 2-Way SLI is discussed here: https://goo.gl/kQ7NgZ

As of May 2016, with the release of GPUS with the Pascal architecture, Nvidia arbitrarily decided to abandon 3-Way and 4-Way SLI configurations with some dubious reasoning. At first, they claimed that there will be some "enthusiast key" that hardcore gamers and system builders can "apply for" and enable/unlock 3-Way and 4-Way SLI. This never happened and is still not reality. Those who eagerly bought 3 or 4 GTX 1080s, and subsequently 3 or 4 Titan X Pascal GPUs thinking they can get the "enthusiast key" and still enjoy the products they purchased with their own money were left in limbo with expensive paperweights (essentially rendering the 3rd or 4th GPU useless).

Nvdia's plan to phase out 3-Way and 4-Way SLI goes against the face of PC enthusiasts and the general notion of building custom gaming computers in general. The consumer should ALWAYS decide what is best for themselves, not the company selling the product! Nvidia, which for all intents and purposes has created a monopoly for itself in the PC desktop GPU space, has autocratically decided to limit SLI systems to two cards or 2-Way SLI.

This is a slippery slope since there is very little competition which can result in an overall loss for the PC gaming enthusiast community.

What is the next step? Disable SLI across the board and only allow single-GPU systems? We, the consumers, get to decide how many GPUs we want to run in our systems.

The Solution

As a PC gaming enthusiast, I purchased 4x GTX 1080 GPUs and since only 2-Way was allowed I installed two cards in two systems I built. I then purchased 4x Titan X Pascal GPUs and with the help of a friend, I was able to get 4-Way SLI working by jumping through many hoops and tweaking settings for many hours on end. 

Although 4-Way SLI works for me, this is a stop-gap measure and is most definitely not the way to move forward.

GTX Titan X Pascal 4-Way SLI works: https://goo.gl/ncYkTw

We want Nvidia, along with its CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, to allow 3-Way and 4-Way SLI configurations on Pascal architecture GPUs (and all GPUs in the future).

Allow the consumer to decide how to build their systems and do not artificially limit hardware configurations for the benefit of PC gaming in general!