If you want Intel Nehalem X58 motherboard with hardware SLI support for up to three cards in SLI and a fourth for physics, you have to pay a saucy $30 for a Nforce 200 chip.

Nforce 200 is the chip that enables you to have three-way SLI and have a fourth card for physics; and thirty dollars for such a chip simply sounds way too much.

The chip itself probably costs a few dollars, but Nvidia is selling its brain with the chip and wants a lot of goodwill for its wisdom that it embedded in the Nforce 200 chip.

The most tragic thing is that the Nforce 200 is one of the hottest chips around and that you can make an X58 motherboard with software SLI, but according to Nvidia, this limits the SLI bandwidth to four x8 instead of four x16. In other words, a board with four PCIe slots, three for graphics and one for physics will be a very expensive adventure if you want the full bandwidth.